I had a tough time putting this assignment together. I had taken about ninety pictures at various times of the day on this construction site (more on that in a bit), and a few scores of pictures representing various stages and elements of botany and horticulture.
I wanted my images to be linked, to have strong associations, but to also be alluring by themselves. I chose this set of three images because to me, it conveyed a sense of loneliness, but still capturing the entropy of construction. It's so interesting looking at the process of architecture and construction, because at first, demolishing the house, gutting walls, breaking windows, and tearing off sections of roof produces an end result that epitomizes entropy. Then the chaos becomes more organized, with levels and balances erecting right angles and patterns. The evolution continues with the sterilized details, the perfectly evened drywall, and all of the final touches that makes a structure feel complete.
In my narrative, I attempted to chronologically portray both the order and the entropy, with a bit more emphasis on the grunge. (Below will be my next series of images that did not make the cut, but were still compelling enough to make me wonder if I'd made the right choice).
Anyways, a bit of history. These images are very personal to me, because this was the house I grew up in. I moved in when I was four, and most of my earliest vivid episodic memories are of helping my parents design the house and participate in the initial construction. That was about fifteen years ago, and my mother made the decision to remodel--no--gut, the house. I was quite opposed, but she figured the house needed to reflect the fact the family now consisted of older kids (college and high school) and the rationalization that she and my father would probably keep the house well into retirement. It's been nearly a year since the first walls were cut down, and I have been photodocumenting the construction in one form or another the entire time.
The above narrative represents the morning light, the afternoon work, and the evening abandonment the site goes through every day. These images don't do justice to how feverish and busy the site actually is, but I wanted to portray a more serene, dark, and mystical aura to make the pictures a bit more interesting than standard "oh, they're building a house" images. I thought the images worked well together because each has only one light source--the morning or afternoon sun from the windows and the bright florescent light illuminating the area that used to be our garage.
Only one image has a human element, and I decided to include that because it synced well with the darker, moody motif (edited, the image is much darker, and the printed version works much better in the set). The top and bottom images, my two favorites, show the collateral damage, the dirt, garbage, and grime left over. The series is supposed to represent the construction site before, during, and after human presence. The sharpie "VERY FRAGILE" on the plastic sheeting and the illegible sharpied disregarded plastic bag in the bottom image allow this narrative to flow not only chronologically, but also in imagery themes.
UPDATE:
Excerpt from Final Project:
"When asked the standardized prompts of “what story is being told?” K.J. instantaneously explained that the “morning sunlight through window,” “worker on stilts,” and “nighttime, keep out” represented the chronological progression of the construction site. She became very talkative, in fact, more talkative and excited than I had ever seen her (well, maybe minus the days after the birth of her grandson). She said my narrative gave her a sense of Déjà vu, and from this I gained memories and insight into her former life. K.J. used to hand-draw architectural models, working for a construction and design company. She grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down the name of her former employer, and it was obvious to all of us that she missed the job. She was an architect, an artist, and a mathematician, but even a stroke could not rob her of her intelligence, wit, and amiable personality.
On a roll, K.J. transitioned to the subtext of my photographic narrative, struggling but succeeding to come up with the word “lonely” on her own. K.J. has trouble verbalizing specific emotion, but always projects it with body language, facial expressions, and simple utterances such as “ew” or “eek.” I feel K.J. truly internalized the union of photographic technicality and interpretive speech therapy literacy. She was able to answer complex prompts such as “do formal elements such as composition and framing, quality of light, focus or vantage point influence your interpretation of the photograph?”
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In the following set, I focused more on details of the chaotic collateral from the construction, but ultimately chose the above three as my final narrative because I thought they could at least represent some form of story. These following images relate to one another in theme and color, but I don't feel they conclusively tell me any form of story. But hey, they're not bad pictures, so here they are.
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