Rachel Verhaaren Photography

Continuing with some more consistent posts, here are some images from my studio lighting class this past semester with the wonderful Jonathan Trundle. Normally in studio electives we will have some preliminary assignments to master techniques and then a larger final project that is more conceptual. In studio lighting, however, we chose to work through a variety of techniques during the entirety of the semester and compile a portfolio of examples for our final.

So here are some images from studio lighting!

It turns out that my statement yesterday was incorrect. I have not finished showing all of my work from the end of junior year. I know, I’m a horrible person. I apologize.

This is my Body in Photography final. While I soon hope to have this and other more developed bodies of work on the portfolio section of the site, they’re being blog’d in the mean time.

During my time at MICA I have developed a certain affinity for plaster gauze, as seen in my work in my Accumulation and Metaphor class. So for Body I chose to work with the medium again. I cast certain sections of my body and then posed them in various positions within the confines of my apartment. The work talks about isolation and the removal of identity while still capturing a gesture or personality. I also had a lot of fun covering myself in plaster gauze. Enjoy!

when i first came to MICA the photography class i was most excited to take was alternative processes. i came out of the class not necessarily thrilled with what i learned or what i had produced but i still think it was an important class to have experienced.

we worked on a project that threw me for a bit of a loop at first- a negative exchange during which i was handed abstract pinhole images i had no interest in. but i was on this circle kick and i think these turned out ok. they’re paper negative collages scanned to create digital negatives and then contact printed with the van dyke brown process.

we also had to make images from our own negatives. i printed digital negatives and suspended them by pins away from a cream piece of mat board. these are just the images sans fancy display stuff but i think you get the idea.

for our final i chose to scan 8mm film that my mother gave me. the film is from when my grandparents were young, my family has copied the film onto VHS so i could do whatever i wanted with it. i enlarged the images and made wintergreen transfers of two sections of the film, sixteen frames each since 8mm film runs sixteen frames per second. these are just some selections from one of them. i think it is my grandmother but i’m not sure.

Lynn would give us an assignment and two weeks in which to complete it. we had one week to work on the project on our own before she presented slides of images that related to the assignment. then we would have another week to work before critique. i thought this was a great way to have us think for ourselves as well as showing us inspiring images from other photographers.

so here are some images from the class!

single image narrative

multiple image narrative
*printed twice, viewed both backwards and forwards*

final
images presented in a handmade book

agh! sorry for the image overload! i’m really going to try to update this regularly so it won’t just be a million pictures at once.