Category — Artistic Encounters

At first I thought it would be a simple task. How hard could photography be? Little did I know that photography was actually harder than I thought. My biggest problem was that I had difficulty choosing a theme. I have always taken pictures of auspicious occasions, family and friends, landscapes and pretty objects. Therefore, doing this project was actually new to me because I would have to go looking for pictures to match up to my theme. After compiling about 200 pictures that I took and leafing through each one, I realized that most of my pictures related to one theme: people struggling to cope with everyday life for everyday living. With the amount of pictures I took in the subway and in the streets, I came up with the title I have because of the correlation between people trying to make a living on the streets and those doing the same underground but in a different way. [Read more →]

In America today everyone expects things to be instant. People want to get fast money without saving, they want to lose weight immediately without diets, and they want technology to work faster and faster. Society has no patience to wait for things to happen, and they want instant gratification. The collage is designed to have a congested feeling. We expect so many things to happen instantly, that our lives have become much more complicated. Even though everything is supposed to be easier and simpler, the instant culture causes people to try to do too much at once.         

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When we were first given this project, I didn’t waste much time before I knew my theme.  I would put together a collaboration of different things that define me.  There are three things that I hold very highly in life: sports, family, and religion.  Ever since I was a child I knew these three aspects of my life would give me strength, power, and determination to succeed.  Surprisingly, as soon as I decided on this theme, I knew exactly what I wanted to include in the actual collage. [Read more →]

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Initially, I thought that street photography was no big deal, just find some interesting characters and shoot their pictures. Nothing in life is that simple. Often, even the most basic shots take thought and effort to capture from the right angle, distance, and lighting.

            The theme for the photography project assigned to my class is cultural encounters. The isolated Chasidic Village of New Square is three miles away from my house. My theme is a subculture of Chassidism in America. New Square is .4 square miles with close to 5,000 residents. There is an average of 5.8 people per family and the median age is 14 years old. [Read more →]

          The title of my collage is “Exploration → Progress.” It is based on the idea that exploration fosters progress in our society. This idea is the general truth that I came to when I was thinking about the theme of cultural encounters. Cultural encounters are a form of exploration because through these experiences you are able to learn about the various groups of people in the world. With this new understanding comes progress because by using the knowledge that you obtained during your cultural encounter, you can create something magnificent – a relationship, an idea, or something material. [Read more →]

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City Lights

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My collage project entitled “Eastern Cherub” focuses on religious ideology from different cultures. [Read more →]

Some “Street” Photography (click link to see video)

The biggest problem, and the only solution, to this assignment was the scope of the project. The fact that we were allowed total freedom in what to shoot meant that anything was available to be captured on film, something so unrestrictive as to become intimidating.  Despite this, however, I still advocate that art should never be restricted because, much like Einstein found the answers to physics hidden deep within calculus, so too can an artist find his final inspiration in an area he had previously ignored.  For me, art never meant deciding upon something and then following through with it until the end.  In my opinion, art is a constantly dynamic endeavor wherein the artist repeatedly shuffles ideas through his or her head.  The end result is that the original inspiration simply becomes a starting point and the final product is a formation of all the ideas that went through the artist’s mind in the creative process. [Read more →]

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     Street photography is a difficult art form. Not only is it a type of photography that encompasses a multitude of subjects, but it is also a form that is vulnerable to the influence of many outside factors. As a result, it is always a new experience even if the photographer has been shooting street photography for years. However, the result is always extraordinary because there is a sense of intimacy with the subject that arises from the photographer’s need to overcome the many obstacles that exist in the process of shooting street photography.

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