Beauty In Insignificance

       Everyone has pivotal moments in their lives whether those be certain events or even people that we encounter.  I believe with every part of my being that even moments of seemingly insignificance are special and should be captured.   Photographs have the ability to express a raw emotion.  The beauty of photography is that it absorbs moments that may otherwise be forgotten.  Photos help us to remember.  They draw us back to the way the sun felt on our skin that one hot Indian Summers day.  Back to the aches we felt in our stomachs from laughing uncontrollably over a look exchanged between two close friends.  Even back to the way the ocean smelled during our last free day of summer.  My passion for photography stems from these emotional connections that they evoke within me.  However, the artist in me can not deny a photos visual beauty.  The visual rhetoric within a piece ( the lighting, the hues, the space) is something that fascinates me as an art form.  This medium interprets the impacts of visual images on an audience's thought or actions.  Black and white still images are incredibly powerful; the most raw because color plays no role, therefor what is there is true.  The movement within the ballet series beginning from one dancer and translating then to two and then to three performers showed growth, even unity as they became one entity in a sense.  When I captured these images I was surprised at the strength of the one dancer, even in her solidarity.  When joined by her coworkers her power only seemed to be magnified.  This same solidarity can be seen within the next few black and white images.  The way that the scarf draped across the woman's face, only upheld by a few fingers, added movement and even a sense of shelter or confinement to the image.  The lighting within both of the images depicting this woman illuminated a sense of hope, especially in the way that it shined upon her eyes which are indefinitely the most powerful.  Within the next series or set of images I added a filtered film to my lens to create a retro kind of weathered tint to each of the images, making their translation to the audience much more nostalgic, even more personal.  Each photograph having rounded edges and this brown film created this All American Dream theory for me, drawing back memories of flipping through my mothers old photo albums.  I wanted to take a more abstract approach to the more compiled images towards the end of the slideshow in order to add a creative take on everyday living.  Utilizing my Diana-F Lomographic camera that enables me to overlay photographs I attempted to capture simple images at multiple rates.  The over saturated colors, multi-images, and dark fading which rounded the edges of each picture illuminated an eerie dream-like state of mind that I never imagined could have been captured.  They draw me back to different memories throughout my childhood because of such effects, even though they were captured recently.  Taking this art form further to analyze an audiences potential stake or thoughts towards them, being that they are powerful or light-hearted, makes this so much more than a hobby for me.  Capturing moments in this lamented piece of history drives me to take photography so much further than just in my personal life.  Documenting seemingly insignificant moments such as these has better lead me to discover my passion for not only photography but writing as well.  I hope to transcend both talents into a career much further down the line in the field of photo-journalism as an aspiring traveling correspondent.