Still Life

"CAPTAIN KRAKOWER"

This image shows my late Great-Grandfather's police captain hat resting on a post in front of a graveyard. I took this image by driving to the cemetery nearest Freeport Town Hall and trudging through the snow that lead up to the gate in order to place the hat on some part of the gate and take the picture. I tried multiple angles and positions, but ultimately settled on this one, because it showed so much of the graveyard and is fairly well balanced.

This image uses leading lines in the row of graves reading to the back, informal balance, and some repetition of the graves. This project was constantly changing, as I kept thinking of different viewpoints and focuses I wanted it to have.

Ultimately, I settled on it having a couple meanings through what you see in the photo. My Great Grandfather died when I was about 3, and I only met him a couple times. Throughout the rest of my life, I've heard great stories about him through my mother and grandmother. But to me, all he's really been in my memory is my dead great-grandfather who I have faint memories of and a police hat that symbolizes him (he was a police captain in Florida). So for this photo, I wanted to show what a member of my family represented to me through still life and the best symbols I could think of were the hat and the graves. If I were to revise this project, I would turn the flash off. The flash was on in all the pictures from this angle.