Final Portfolio

Final written Assignment:

-FINAL WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT:

Look back at the 8 images you selected for the first assignment. Compare and contrast those images with the images in your final portfolio. How have your ideas about images changed? How has your sense of what they can communicate grown? Write a short essay (200-300 words) comparing the 2 groups of images.

Answer:

Looking back at the images I presented at the beginning of the year, I do not see a huge difference with my subject matter or composition of it, but the way I now use the subject to create a story. I have always loved portrait photography. It is something I want to continue with in the future and hopefully pursue as a lifetime career. The main difference I see between my photography now and a few months from now, is that I am not only taking photographs of a person or portrait of a specific object. Instead, I am taking a photograph about who and what that person or object is about. I like to focus on the reality of my subject and capture it right in the moment it is happening. Compared to just staging a model, the photographs I take now, tell a story in itself based on the live action and moment shown in the image. I not only feel that my photography now has a stronger look, but a stronger message and feeling that I hope to continue in the near future.

Although I love both black and white photography, I feel with my sense of photography, I am becoming more prone to using black and white images. With my goal and subject matter, I feel that this solution is best for documenting and telling the story of the subject or object being shown in each one of my images. Although color can help with that as well, I feel a lot of my more successful photographs are those produced in black and white. I have also learned that I enjoy playing with different types of lighting and how I can use it in different settings to tell a specific story, something I have never done before.

Looking back at what I did in the past, and comparing it to my most recent photographic images, I really cannot believe how far I have gotten and how much my skill has progressed in such a short period of time. I am a storyteller and I have always wanted to bring that out in my photography which is another love of mine. Now that I feel like I am that much closer to succeeding, there’s nothing more that I can ask for! 

Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1995