School

Artist Statement

For this assignment we were straying away from the traditional and conceptual aspects of photo taking. We switched over into a journalism unit while documenting our photos. For this particular journal we had to take a picture of what school is like for us now. The way we are when we do school or where we are, all because of this new change no one expected. For this image I took a picture of my "Office" or my beanbag for short. This is where I finish and do all my work on a given school day. For this image I decided to take a photo of my water bottle and my laptop. I included the water bottle because I drink about 4 of these things in a day (about 84 ounces of water) because it gets me through my day as well as makes me go to the bathroom a lot to give me a break. I included my laptop because that is how everyone in the state is learning. I also added a hidden messages on the tabs that say, "Why am I going crazy?" and "Covid 19 Impacts" and then had an old essay open as well. I included those because I felt like it gave the photo a little bit more meaning as well as a little more depth than usually. The only thing I did to edit this was turn down the brightness just a hair and changed the color tint slightly as well.

The photo techniques I used in my image were Angle up as well as selective focus. For angle up I took the photo below my water bottle and aimed up to make it look bigger and to also show how low I am to the ground. And for the selective focus you can see that most of the image is focused on the laptop and the water bottle and nothing else is in focus. My original idea for this was to use a picture of a basketball hoop and use it to define how I am going to miss seeing spring sports and having all those sports go on but I didn't really think that was a very good way to document school. So I took a traditional photos of my workspace and used that instead.

The meaning behind the image is to promote a stress free environment. All of this going on has made me a lot more stress free and a lot easier to be comfortable while doing school. It is a big change but I definitely don't hate it as much as others do. This relates to my life because this is my life now. This is my "Office" for the next 2-3 months and I have to get used to it. I wouldn't really change anything about this image because it is an accurate depiction of how my everyday looks at school.

-Matthew Kempf