Reflecting on "Looking Down"

Despite the strange “what the hell is that girl doing” stares I received from my fellow Bowdoin students, I enjoyed taking pictures looking down. It is an angle I have rarely used in my approach to a photography assignment and as the project progressed, I found it exciting to discover various ways to create interesting and unique images looking solely at what is below me. Never before have I paid such attention and detail to the ground on which I walk, the vast materials that make up the foundation of this ground, and the wide range of trash and other miscellaneous objects and structures that blanket our world. Capturing this all in a unique way was most challenging and I hope that my pictures lead the viewers through sort of a rediscovery process; I hope the collection of images reveal a new way of observing, challenge current assumptions of Brunswick’s landscape, and stimulate responses to things which seem so ordinary.

It was certainly difficult at first to work with a more narrow depth of field and no horizon, but I tried to resolve this issue by shooting close up so that the minimal depth of field that did exist was enhanced. I found myself taking a lot of these “zoomed-in” pictures and I think the results are more interesting and provoking than had I taken the images at my “eye-level”. Another common thread throughout my photographs is the presence of line and geometric shapes, which ultimately create “blocks” of color, textures and patterns in the photos. A lot of my pictures can be divided horizontally, vertically, diagonally, etc and why I am drawn to this form of composition, I am not quite sure. One last similarity among my photographs is the location of where they were shot. The majority of my pictures were taken in areas I spend most of my day. The cluster of photos around Pine St. for this assignment is therefore, not too surprising!