Public Patterns

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This photo series is the final product of my photography Capstone and has been displayed at the Collins Cafe at Wellesley College and at Iyo Cafe in Somerville, MA.

Artist's Statement

Traditionally, photographs have represented single moments in time, but the photographs in this series represent a compression of many moments into a single frame, in a way similar to Peter Funch's Babel Tales series. In each of my images, I have combined up to fifty different photographs, taken of the same location over a period of ten to thirty minutes, to create a digital tableau. After removing all human figures from the scene using bits and pieces of several photos, I repopulate the composite with individuals selected from the original series of photos.

My intent with these photographs is to evoke an uncanny feeling and raise questions about the actions and interactions of the people in the scene. How did they come to be in this situation? What will happen next? What is happening between individuals? Why did the photographer choose this perspective? In order to achieve this effect, I have manipulated the people I photographed and placed them, unbeknown to them, into a semi-fictional scene that I created. The background and all the people are real, but I have used them to make an image of a scene that looks real although it is completely fake. A few of the figures are repeated in order to hint at the heavily manipulated nature of the photographs, but the majority reflect patterns of activity I noticed while shooting, funny or bizarre actions by individuals, and interactions or patterns I specifically created.

By intently watching and later manipulating the people in my photographs, I want to draw attention to the way we are surveilled and manipulated by the government and private industry. While some of this surveillance happens in a way similar to my photographs, with security cameras, we also supply significant information voluntarily through social networks, loyalty programs, or GPS enabled devices. We may be aware that much of this data is stored and analyzed to provide us with better products and supposedly protect us from terrorists, but I’m not sure we are concerned with what will happen to this permanently stored information ten, twenty, or thirty years from now. Much like I have manipulated the people in my photographs into situations of which they were never a part and which never actually existed, could the information collected about us be shaped and abused to implicate us in such pseudo-fictional scenarios?

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When I shoot, I watch what is happening below me very carefully and I often see interesting people and interactions. Some people may stand out by running instead of walking, some people may look different or act differently. While I'm watching and when I review the images later, I think of stories I could tell with particular characters and of interactions I could create among them. Once I decide on a few interesting characters to work with, I try to create some tension within the scene, such as the young couple confronting (or being confronted by?) the security officer in CabridgeSide Galleria. I look for patterns in how people use the particular spaces that I'm photographing and try to highlight these patterns by extracting and amplifying a particular group of characters that is exhibiting the pattern. Again, in Galleria, I saw many people leaning over the bannister and looking down and decided to select those individuals, multiply some of them, and place them in the scene. As a result, I can imagine a detailed narrative taking place, and I hope that other viewers can do the same.