Cynthia Zeman Final Project Proposal

Zeman Project Concept

I’m interested in shooting diaristic account of this peculiar time of pandemic.  Trapped in a house for safety,  I’d like to record  the house I live in  and explore it from that perspective,  and the ways the outside world breaks into that sanctuary.  I am particularly interested in photographing the lamps in my house as a stand-in for the body, as a metaphor for awareness and enlightenment.  Literally shining a light on the situation, I am also interested in what each lamp will illuminate.  This would be a topology project, with narrative and observational elements.  Each photo would document a lamp, but would also capture the surrounding environment, suggesting, through other objects around the lamp, a story of the people who live there.

 

Zeman Technical Approach (Input)

I intend to shoot this series with my Nikon D3500, using a manual 50mm lens and a new tripod.  Many of the pictures will be in a vertical format to center the lamp.  I am probably going to try several different methods of shooting before I settle on one.  I’d like to shoot the lamps turned on at night.  My shutter speed can be a bit slow, and I will either raise the ISO, because I don’t want to have a very shallow depth of field and have to open up my lens (which only goes to f2.8), or …I might light the lamps, as I have a light kit that I could use.  It might be interesting to either spotlight the lamps, or spotlight the objects around them, photographically faking the light the lamp would normally cast.  Any suggestions?

I am not going to limit my palette, but rather work with the color relationships in the house and its contents that already exist, and perhaps rearrange and dust off the objects to compose the photo.

 

Zeman Technical Approach (Output)

I have a tiny obsession with lamps.  In my living room alone, I have three floor lamps and 15 table lamps.  I firmly believe tables exist to hold lamps.  A few years ago I dedicated a hardcover sketch book to lamps that I own.  On one page I drew the lamp, and on the facing page I wrote a bit about where I found it or bought it.  I would like to consider these photographs as a continuation of that idea, documenting a specific time and domestic place with a sense of humor – a portrait of a person through things.  I think a book or website combining the drawings, writing and photographs might be interesting.

 

RESPONSE FROM REBECCA:

Cynthia,

I like the idea of the lamp, particularly as an anthropomorphic stand-in for a human subject. I have no doubts about your ability to document objects with wit, creating domestic still life images that, I imagine, will intersect the mundane and the magical. That the project will act as a diaristic account of your personal space during the pandemic, and also add to an existing object-image-archive creates additional layers of specificity. I see this work as having poetic potential, opening up the possibilities of varying your apprach image to image for a body of work that feels complex and varied even as it looks at similar objects/spaces.

My thoughts return again to Irina Rozovsky’s Quotidian and Surreal series of pandemic images in the New York Times, which feels relevant to what you describe. Consider also the history of photographers who create image series from within the confines of their own homes/studios, such as Josef Sudek’s The Window of My Studio (shot over a period of about 15 years) and Uta Barth’s light studies (which are perhaps more abstract than what you’re looking to do but should nonetheless be on your radar). Other work to consider: Margaret Watkins’ Domestic Symphonies, Takashi Yasumura’s banal objects, Laura Letinsky’s Hardly More Than Ever, and the photographers featured in the 2009 exhibition Photodimensional at Columbia College of Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, which looks at photography’s efforts to capture sculptural objects and space.

Regarding your technical input, consider using your tripod and live-view manual focus to shoot with small apertures for maximum depth of field that will allow you to capture extensive information. This will avoid the work feeling overly romantic, and I think might create a relationship between this body of photographs and your paintings. I would also consider finding a time of day when the exposure outside of a room’s window is the same as the interior exposure of the room with the lamp on. At this time of year, that is likely around 7am or 3pm, but you’ll have to run some experiments. This will act as an entrance into the work we do with mixed light sources next semester, and might have the potential to create interesting relationships between exterior/interior views. I don’t know if I would stay married to the idea of vertical framing (my fear of commitment is showing), if only because it might limit your ability to discover potential spatial relationships when you set up to shoot. Introducing additional artificial light sources like your kit is a great idea…it will “weaken” the lamp as the only light source in the image and allow us to truly see it without being blinded by it. I might consider a mix of that approach and the lamp as the main souce of light (particularly when combined with exterior light as described above). You might also consider long exposures where you paint with a flashlight…these are all options to try at the outset, but I also think you can create a compelling body of work without overcomplicating the production.

Regarding your technical output, the idea of a book is exciting. In the long-term, I can imagine that there would be an opportunity for you to make a piece that includes text, hand-written notes, and drawings/paintings (which you mention here) along with the photographic images. For this semester, I would focus on making, processing, and sequencing the photographic images.

-R