My students last year asked me a pointed and fair question after I had spent a full year riding them about getting their portfolios finished and submitted for review: have you been working on a project too?
I hadn’t been working on anything, and it bugged me. 2016 was my first year teaching photography and while I wanted more than anything to spend all of my extra time working on improving my own photography and diving into new projects, the truth was that I had gotten too wrapped up learning how to be a teacher to focus on anything like that.
So this semester, that changes. I want to walk with my photography students and go through the process of learning while I teach. I’m hoping to get some insight about how my class runs, and what reasonable expectations for my students look like. I’m also hoping to get some rad photos out of the deal.
This marks the kickoff for my own photo project, which I’m calling “Unsettled.”
Unsettled is going to be a series of unsettling food photographs that invoke challenging ingredients and subject matter to try to get a reaction from the viewer. I’m going to emulate the three color carbro process digitally, and you’re going to see a lot of awkward hands manipulating food.
I want to throwback to the ’40s and ’50s, when magazine and food photographers were trying to show off decadence, excess and beauty in the food world. I’m looking at photographers like Paul Outerbridge, Nickolas Muray, and more recent photographers like Boman+Sjöstrand and Kiernan Monaghan and Theo Vamvounakis for inspiration.
Some examples:
Now a few ideas:
- A bruised peach or banana. Maybe one of each. This should be a filler idea when I’ve got a lot else going on that week and can’t spend time cooking or prepping. I would have to have the Hero on a table with a pretty simple colorful background and a lot of light.
- I have this vision in my head of prickly pear tacos using a prickly pear frond (instead of a tortilla). The unsettling nature would come from the (hopefully) spines on the outside of the shell. Not sure this is possible in any capacity yet, and may require some experimentation. I envision this in a kind of Taco Bell pallet (purple and pink?)
- Rabbit of some kind. This will require some planning and procurement.I may have to play around with this one. I envision an awkward hand (a la
Muray) holding a fork with a large roasted carrot on it. This was inspired by a street painting a restaurant in Scottsdale. - Cow tongue. I’ve had a few delicious cow tongue tacos, and I think that could be visually challenging to shoot, but interesting.
- An overlarge boiled egg. I’m picturing an Ostrich egg from the Ostrich farm on the way to Tucson. I believe it could make for a pretty wild photo if done correctly.
- Bugs. Ashley is on board with this one too. Bugs are the way of the future. I think that a bug photo could be ripe for repetition as well.
More to come.
Ultimately, the biggest challenges are going to be time and a place to shoot. I’m going to start working on converting the garage into a place where I can easily set up and take down a set, and I will focus on using lighting to set my scene, rather than intricately designed rooms that would cost a fortune to furnish for a single photograph.
I also need lights. Those I think I have. What I’m not sure about is some method for really controlling the light (modifiers, remote triggers, etc).
Here we go. The first week will come by pretty quickly, so I will have to sort my plan out soon. Get ready to be unsettled.
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