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!

So I’m still very much behind on keeping my blog up to date on the work I’ve been doing. Another semester has passed and I haven’t finished showing work from the semester before. Well, here it is, the last of the work from spring semester 2010.

In the photo dept we have to take a junior seminar class which functions similarly to senior thesis in the sense that we work on a single body of work for the whole semester. For my project I chose to finally culminate all of the work I’ve been doing with optics and the way I see without the aid of glasses or contacts. Below is my artist statement for the project:

Transformation, change, perception. When the simplest of differences can alter your experience.

I have taken photographs of objects and instances that I encounter daily, usually without notice. The one element that has been altered is that I am seeing them without the full capacity of sight. By removing my glasses I have the opportunity to reinvent the world.

The text paired with the images allows the viewer a glimpse into the new reality I have created. Without the words the image is a blurred version of the commonplace but with them, they can understand how impaired sight is not always a hindrance, but a way to heighten our interpretation of the everyday.

And some of the images:

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.