“nostalgia”

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY + illustration + scans; 08/2020

THIS PIECE WAS A PART OF MY semester PROJECT, FOR MY high school PHOTOGRAPHY CLASS (ap 2d art and design, 2020 junior year, INSTRUCTED BY brian guilfoyle).

For this project, we were assigned to choose and develop an overall concept and create 15 concentrations. My concept was “Youth”

Artist statement:

these photos represent a feeling that many teenagers feel from time to time. Nostalgia stands to be one of the most bittersweet emotions humans can process as it emits a sense of familiarity and longing for a time or feeling that we can no longer experience. The memory of a place that a person once found comforting lives in the mind of almost every individual as “home”. When it comes to today’s youth, one could confidently say that this feeling of serenity almost never exists due to the pressures of life such as school, family, friends, society, ect. Whenever times get rough, I often feel myself trying to search for that place of comfort within my mind. However, no matter what I do, I will never be the same little girl who could carelessly and freely fly around the playground. This sense of desperation to go back to simpler times can be seen within the face of my model, as they sit on the latter of a playground set. their desperate expression, bold outfit, and dark makeup can all be clearly seen to contrast the point of them being on a playground. The clashing of blossoming maturity and innocent fun was the main focus of this piece. In order to emphasize the childhood aspect of the concept, I made sure to shoot at night as well as add drawings that I drew as a child. I found that children have significantly different perspectives on life in comparison to the average teenager. Just as I did back then, I draw or create things out of how I perceived my own life at the present time. The combination of my past art and my current art really allows for this obvious shift of perspective as well as growth to be seen. In order to get to my final piece, I moved around the three back main photos about four times. At first the model’s profile shot was placed at the main right end of the project. However, after revising, I found that I wanted to place their face at the beginning left side of the piece, almost to introduce them to the project in a storytelling manner. In addition, when it came to deciding how I would place these pictures, I found the cold and harsh collision of these pictures were better than smoothing out and merging edges. I didn't want it to seem that these pictures were meant to feel as one. Each picture represents its own level of artistic value to the piece, thus I decided to add the pictures just as they were with no further editing in terms of combination. In terms of experimentation, I tried out many different childhood drawings to see which ones would fit the piece the best. I finally concluded that the girl, dog, grass, sun, and butterfly drawings fit the piece the best as these drawings were very simple as well as the most frequently drawn in my old sketchbooks. Overall, this piece was meant to show how most teens long for that time of simplicity, when life was always good and the irony of wanting to grow up but also not wanting to let go of the past. The nostalgia one feels when entering a familiar place or smell may create a desire to melt back into that time. But you can't go back, and perhaps that is the saddest yet sweetest part of growing up in our world.