My America.

Taking inspiration from Robert Frank.

This project was given to me at the beginning of the spring 2023 semester. Our task was to capture images that reflect our view and image of the country we live in, inspired by the work of Robert Frank. In Franks' work, he was able to capture true emotions in his photos, and find amazing subjects that created their own story. His work was interpretable, and had the ability to created many different feelings for the viewer. His series "People You Don't See" does this very well. At first glance, the images appear to just be candid photos of average civilians going about their life. However each subject is different, and their appearance and own emotions create different meanings for each image. Their clothes, expressions, accessories, all create a story within the image. And then simply by adding the title "People You Don't See" it adds much deeper meaning to the images as a whole. With this project, I wanted to try to accomplish something similar.

Creating my own interpretation.

At first I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to personalize this collection to really depict my America, and what emotions I wanted to show in my own work. However after taking a few photos and exploring different places I decided that I really wanted to approach this project by trying to capture nostalgia. More specifically, that feeling you get when visiting a place you used to love as a kid that's now a lot more dark and dingy than you remember. I really wanted to try to capture the sadness of seeing your favorite park or mall abandoned and falling apart. The deep feeling of familiarity, but also an earie sense of everything being completely wrong. Having grown up in Fort Dodge, this was quiet easy. A lot of the images I captured have a lot more meaning to me than what meets the eye, and quite a few of them have childhood memories attached to them. Along with this I tried to capture a lot of graffiti, mostly because I absolutely love street art, and I have big opinions about graffiti and freedom of expression.

While I do feel I was able to capture my ideas for this project very well, I also feel that there was a lot more images that I could have captured that would have been great additions to this collection. I had many, many ideas for this project and really wish I was able to include those in this collection. However I do feel that it really does express the emotions I wanted it to, and I am very proud of this series. I feel that this project has helped me grow a lot as a photographer, and I feel that both my work, and especially Robert Franks' work, have taught me to see my present surroundings for what it is. When walking through your hometown you may overlook drastic details, and often times we become used to a our surroundings, or begin to overlook aspects of our environment that we definitely shouldn't see as "normal". One of my favorite quotes from Robert Frank is, "It is important to see what is invisible to others". I think that photographing our surroundings and viewing said photographs we can shock ourselves into becoming aware of our current surroundings, and can bring attention to things that have become invisible to us.