Fingerprints of Life
This was a final project for one of my photo courses.
Sometimes when I’m outdoors I become so immersed in my surroundings that I lose awareness of the minute details around me. In Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she talks a lot about the willful act of “getting lost,” which she defines as allowing yourself to be found in a position in which you are unfamiliar. She discusses this as a solitary experience… you getting lost in something you don’t know. However, I believe that getting lost is directly intertwined with discovery, specifically, discovery of other lives. I think observation and interaction with this "other life" is a critical part of your own self examination. The subtle evidence of such lives can, too often, go unnoticed by me. I can get lost in the grind, the hurry, the work and even the beauty of life that I fail to evaluate the implications that other living beings – people, animals, even plants – have on my life. I decided to dedicate this project to acknowledging the fingerprints that other lives have left on my own. To do so I took a camera and went exploring. I drove through backroads of Nashville, wandered on and off paths in nearby parks, considered even my own yard as a habitat of the lives that mark me. I aimed to capture their existence in the following photographs.
Each of these photos provides evidence of a life, sometimes multiple. A child’s soccer ball left out in the yard. A wasp nest knocked to the ground. Electrical lines running along the branches of a budding tree. Shelf fungus sprawling up and around a fallen tree limb. These obscure things so frequently go unnoticed. I want to highlight them as a part of my landscape, a documentation of their existence and presence.I hand-wrote this statement originally, to preserve my own presence within this project. My life contributed to the making of these photos just like the kids who built the ladder for their rope swing, the butterfly that sat still on the weeds, the sheep that was glaring at me when I pressed the shutter and the person who tossed that blue crate into the stream so I wanted to leave a mark just like they did. This project was shot solely on Portra 400 with a Hasselblad 500cm.
