Sophomore Madeline Nisbet wants to show how anxiety can skew our perception of reality. She used her sister’s hands and their shower room door to get the sliding down effect. Nisbet says the hands represent our internal thoughts.
“We just judge with our eyes, and then our internal thoughts kind of get blown out of the way. The hands represent the internal thoughts trying to break through, but we really just see surface level of the everyday eye.”
Nisbet’s utilization of eyes in her Sustained Investigation project highlights how people judge solely based on what they see. (Photo courtesy of Madeline Nisbet)
Advanced and AP Photography students have spent their year delving into a topic of their choice and exploring them artistically through their pictures.
Advanced students chose about six images for their Sustained Investigation projects while AP students submitted about 15 images to depict visual ideas which ranged from light displays to the ties of technology to anxiety pop art.
Students were encouraged to choose any concept or object as long as the subject was personally important to the photographer.
The Tribe Tribune spoke with seven AP Photography students about their pieces.
Senior Delaney Spillane’s project shows that relationships, either friendly and romantic, can be strengthened by the virtual world. In other words, social media and text messaging can be positive relationship-building tools.
Spillane took a photo of her parents holding hands. “The colorful wires represent technology and show that tech can bring people together,” she said.
Senior Nathaniel Le went to many different locations throughout last year to take photos for the art show. To capture these photos Le used his DSLR camera, but for the reflection photo he stuck his head out the sunroof of a car and took pictures from there. The first photo is the Los Angeles skyline through the point of view of Elysian Park.
Sophomore Nathan Karcher went backpacking with his father at Los Angeles National Forest over the summer and was inspired by the scenery around him that he felt compelled to take a photo of his hiking trip on his iPhone.
“I don’t bring my camera on my trips,” said Karcher.
Karcher is drawn to capturing silhouettes in his photos, his SI topic. In order to truly capture the silhouettes cast in darkness, the image of the boat in the harbor was taken at 2:00 in the morning.
Senior Lawson Turrietta chose to take a colorful, reflecting, and contrasting photo on a trip of his to New York. He wanted to show how water adds depth to a picture that one wouldn’t expect.
“Well I was going to go out regardless, but I didn’t know that the rain was going to help make the picture that much better,” says Turrietta, “But when I look back at the picture, I was glad that it rained.”
He had to take many photos in order to get one good picture of the light reflecting off the water on the ground. He then edited to make the lights shine brightly in contrast to the dark background.
The process of taking the actual picture took much effort, as he was his own model for both of those in the gallery. “They took tons of takes, and for the one of the floating hard I had to balance my camera on a table in a hallway at school to get the right angle.”
Frank’s experiences with anxiety personally are captured hauntingly in black and white, and they plan for their collection to become gradually more and more surrealist, in the process of creating concept art of a person under water in a bathtub.
Sophomore Alejandro Hernandez used long exposure photography for his project. This technique records light in motion creating an intricate still. He uses it to add a reflection on an old car his dad had sitting outside their house at the time.
Reporters Anette Araiza, Sophia Galvan, Katherine Martinez, Sofia Matin, Amy Ramos and Sheila Ruiz contributed to this story.
