My photography—A year of seeing beautifully
This is a year long project that I challenged myself to do. The idea sprang out of the question “what is art?” I grew up in a very conservative community which gave me plenty to rebel against—fertile ground for becoming an artist. I was always asked to create something “beautiful” as if that’s what art was. I always felt that art had to be a revolution, if even in a minor way. That after being exposed to art, or participating in an artistic process, one couldn’t help being transformed—meaning that their world-view could never be the same. This lead me to reject the notion that art always equated beauty, and as an artist I turned my back on creating beautiful things, because I thought beauty couldn’t cause a revolution. I spent the next year with my camera, going out and both finding and creating something beautiful everyday. No matter how tiresome it was, I forged on. I took my camera everywhere I went and set up a few rules for myself: I could not use Photoshop, I had to do all the work in-camera, cropping was not allowed, nor artificial lighting, no camera filters, and no moving objects around, play the ball as it lies so to speak, shoot as many photos as you like in one day, pick only one and move on to the next day—no carry-overs. Over the course of this project I shot over 16,000 photos, 365 are shown in this film, along with some great music. Without a doubt this process changed my life forever and as I said before, I could never again have the same world-view. I would challenge anyone to give this process a try, ultimately it was the process, not necessarily the photos, that was beautiful.