Jenny Thomas/ Artist Statement

Through out my journey in beginning media arts, I have learned and assessed many skills. During the whole semester, we’ve focused on four different topics: Homage Paid to a Chosen Photographer, Retro/Vintage, Typography and we focused and used Annie Leibovitz as inspiration for some of our photos. For my homage photography, I chose to focus on Mr. Robert Adams. The way that I took photos was just by examining his photos. I've looked at a bunch of his photography that I found online and I found that by looking at his pictures, it helped me to get an idea of what I should look for when I went on photo-shoots. For example- he consistently took pictures of withering trees or trees, so I tried to get pictures with trees. Another example is houses or buildings- they were simple to find, but I shot them at an angle for which created depth in the picture, just like Mr. Adams did with his photographs.
He also de-saturated the photos and seemed to “up” the contrast to create further depth in his photography. He noted that the “whiteness” in his black and white pictures created more depth. When we focused on our Vintage/Retro section, we began to work with Adobe Photoshop a bit more. We learned how to work in layers and to take things slowly and to pay attention to every detail to get the best possible photography. We tried to create the illusion that something in a picture is real by cutting out a specific object or person from a different picture. For this, we also still paid homage to our photographers by cutting something of their pictures into ours, or vice-versa. In Adobe Photoshop, I used the eraser tool and cut out something from his photo and blurred the edges of it (using the blur tool) so it wouldn't look all choppy and seem as though it was cut out with scissors. Next, I selected the object I cut out, copied it, opened a new layer with the picture I wanted to use, and then pasted it. I clicked on edit, transform and then scale so I could make it bigger or small. The last few things I did were making it the right saturation/hue I wanted, the right brightness and contrast, adding noise to the picture, etc. When we focused on our Typography unit, we had the option of using lines from poems that Louis Jenkins or Connie Wanek wrote. I split my pictures into half and half, so all of my pictures equally consisted of those two poets. In this, we had to take pictures that matched what the poem was talking about, or a line that we chose. A lot of my photos consisted of winter because I chose a lot of lines that had to do with winter, plus I love the enchanting beauty that the winter season brings to us. I mainly focused on the sharpening tool, and upping the contrast. The font I usually used was called Quilted Butterfly. A lot of my photos in this unit consisted of the color purple because it is my favorite color. This typography unit was my favorite unit because this was a unit that I really put my full effort into. I don’t think I worked as hard on the other units as I did for this one. Our last unit focused on taking pictures from Annie Leibovitz as our inspiration. My model was my sister for this unit, and I focused on portraying people as Annie Leibovitz did. I did not edit my photos a lot for this one, because Annie liked to keep her pictures as original as possible. I only changed the contrast or brightness, but not so much where there’s a huge difference from the original picture. I liked Annie Leibovitz’ style because she had the ability to make simple things look so amazing.