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This set begins in late-September 2011—about four months after commencement week—and ends about three months after that in mid-December. Between leaving Ohio and starting this project I started primarily using a medium format camera, DSLR, and (regrettably) an iPod with Instagram, hence the huge temporal gap.
The baseball game at the beginning of this set is the final Giants game of the somewhat heartbreaking 2011 season. If you notice in the lower right hand corner of the second picture there is a man taking a picture—throughout the game he kept creepily sneaking pictures of my friend until she yelled at him.
The next two pictures were from Christmas-time. My mom and I have a holiday tradition where every year since I was a little kid we go to Downtown San Francisco to look at the department store Christmas window displays. When I was little they were always amazing, elaborate works of art, but in recent years they’ve put a lot less effort into them. Pretty sad.
I don’t remember why I took the last picture. It’s on Telegraph Ave in Oakland, right across from Aunt Mary’s Cafe. This was the first day that I actively came up with the idea for this project.
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The second set from this week’s roll comes from an Indians-Red Sox game I went to during Commencement Week (May ‘11). We arrived a little late, and by the time we got to our seats in the middle of the 1st the Indians were already down 7-0. This was the only Indians game I ever went to during my time in Ohio.
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These next three sets all come from the same roll and span from May–December 2011. This set is from the last trip to Chance Creek before leaving Ohio. The second set is from a Cleveland Indians game during Oberlin Commencement Week, and the final set is a hodge-podge of random photos taken after returning home.
Chance Creek is a little forest beach up the road that Oberlin students go to when the weather turns nice. During my final semester at Oberlin we only had a handful of days nice enough to go, so this wound up being my only trip there all year.
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Though not really a part of this project, I just discovered another set of photos I had totally forgotten about, taken on another photo class field trip about two and a half years after the cement factory set. Both sets are virtually the same subject matter—shooting my photographer peers while on a field trip—and seeing them next to each other is an interesting illustration of how my eye and comfort level behind the camera changed over several years. (Shot digitally at the Akron Museum of Art, September 2010)
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Circa 2008. This was from a field trip to an abandoned cement factory in Lorain County, Ohio that I went on with my Intro to B&W Photography class at Oberlin. I actually remember the trip pretty vividly, though seeing these is kind of embarrassing—I’ve never really had much of an eye for black & white.
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“Never Known Questions,” from The Residents’ Not Available. The album was recorded in 1974 and locked away in a vault with the intention of being released only after the band had forgotten it ever existed.
The Theory of Obscurity is a concept popularized by avant garde experimental music collective The Residents. It hypothesizes that "an artist can only produce pure art when the expectations and influences of the outside world are not taken into consideration." A corollary to this contends that a work of art is only truly complete once the artist has forgotten its existence entirely.
This blog is the organized collection of an exercise in self-created found images. Each week I develop, scan, and post a randomly selected roll of film I shot anywhere from five years to a few days ago, entirely unaware of what was on the roll, while continuing to add to the pool of undeveloped film by shooting five new rolls a week. There is no stated goal or purpose for this exercise yet; it simply marks a sense of curiosity about the relationship between time and artistic intention—an ode to the imperfect nature of memory.
I am a photographer originally from San Francisco, CA and currently living in Oakland, CA. I received my BA in Visual Arts and African American Studies from Oberlin College.
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