Photography has no single place to
study, but I will conduct my research in the classrooms of Texas A&M
University Commerce. There are many different forms of photography that are
focus areas in the photography program. It consists of anything from studio
photography to photo printing techniques.
Once looking for the photography building
you wouldn’t be able to guess which of the buildings the photography classes
are held in but once you look at the principles of photography, you would
actually be able to narrow it down to a few buildings. The photography classes
are held in the journalism building on the third floor. A floor with no windows
which in studio photography and darkroom techniques is a must have for quality
work. When you walk into the journalism building it looks as if it were any
regular class hall. Once you begin to embark up the staircase you are met with
a sense that you have either walked to New England and have set foot on the
staircase leading down to the subway or you have just stepped foot into a bath
house. The stairs are a plain grayish-brown concrete and the walls are a fresh
snow white one inch by one inch tile, something you normally see in bath houses
or a subway, all it was missing was graffiti. The echo of your steps against
the tile provide an almost dramatic soundtrack to introduce something great.
Once you reach the third floor the
appearance goes back to a “regular class hall” but the walls are littered with
student work; photographs, technique tips, cameras set on shelves, cautions and
sayings. Greeted with “can I help you find something” as soon as I stepped
amongst the photography jungle, I could only assume that it was that obvious I
had never been there before. The guy was obviously of some importance as he was
manning the equipment checkout room. Bypassing their security check, I
continued down the hallway that was about the length of a football field with
rooms on the left and right with many doors closed and many doors open sparsely
populated with students conducting their work in them. In the hallway the
lights were on but there was not one of the rooms to my left or right with the
overhead lights on. The only light that could be seen was deep within the
rooms, they were typically dimly lit with areas of light like a secret shrine
in the basement of a house. Each one of these
sources of light were the different projects being artificially lit with many
different kinds of lamps to give different types of lighting to the scenes that
are being created. Near the end of the hallway
there is a lobby area on the left that almost makes you feel like you are
taking a power trip back to the early 90’s where you can see the progression of
camera technology. Decorating the walls are cinematic and photographic cameras
of many different time periods, and with them all looking like they haven’t
been touched in years makes you wonder if they are still functional.
In the last room on the left right before
the lobby area, a guy named Cooper asked for help taking some of his photos.
The room was a room behind a room filled with stands called tripods for many
different types of equipment. In the room where cooper was, he had set the room
to look like a work studio for photography which was the scene for the
photographs. With having everything set up he only required a simple push of a
button. This process continued for almost an hour whereas I began to ask, what
was he trying to do after taking hundreds of photos the exact same way? Cooper
stated that he was trying to create a real looking scene that portrayed a
distressed student who had been working very hard and he was trying to perfect
this look.
After this process was done, I asked to
explore the rooms and he assured it was okay. There was a door on the left wall
in the room that led to a large even darker room with professional lights
hanging from the ceiling, the walls painted pure black and thick curtains
hanging from the ceiling to floor creating 3 different workspaces in one large
dark room that spanned the whole left side of the third floor of this building.
The rooms smelled like a mixture of cloth from the curtains, sitting dust over
time, and a small hint of paint. In the first workspace a girl was working with
a setup that reminded me of an aged advertisement. Not sure of her goal I could
only assume she was creating a scene to showcase the make-up bag of juicy
couture and some of their make-up. She was nice and easy to approach when
asking about her work and she proceeded to ask for criticism on her work as
learned by Cooper, criticism is the best way to learn what works in photography
because you are presenting to viewers. The second space was empty and in the
third another girl had created a scene which looked as if it was a passed
veteran’s memorabilia. Pacing quickly around her work making swift adjustments,
once she sensed my presence she immediately asked for my help once again just
pressing the button on the camera to take the picture. I hesitantly agreed and
took the photo. As I stepped back she looked at the photo then back to the
scene and adjusted some of the props. As I was there to observe I wasn’t
expecting much involvement but with a sense of urgency and dependence she asked
if I could take the picture again. She was satisfied with the second but
continued to work on the same scene. The work ethic of all the photographers
gave a sense of importance to these scenes and were working with a very
straightforward vision that they wanted to create. It almost seemed as if their
grade depended on these projects but none of them had any correlation other
than them all being created in a studio rather than outside. With many
independent projects taking place and classes being held in other rooms it
sounds as if you’re in a plaza of photographers, you hear the mixture of
communication of photographers and their subjects and the sound of the shutters
of cameras and the lamps of the lighting flashing with every click of the
shutter. You also hear the pupils in silence listening to their instructors
only to await their time when they can begin their own work.
Within photography you can see many
different art forms ranging from stereotypical portraiture to body painted
subjects to makeshift advertisements and original creations. With so many different techniques and values of
different conventional and abstract photography, you can almost identify a
person’s personality by the way they shoot and what they shoot. This is the way
a person’s mood, feelings and vision can be expressed through photography.
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