100 Days Photographs: May 2009

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Day 10 - May 31st 2009

Collide

4x5 pinhole tintype

8 minute exposure

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Day 9 - May 30th 2009

Bruisings at the Periphery of Light

4x5 tintype in press camera
1 second exposure

Friday, May 29, 2009

Day 8 - May 29th 2009

Flight Impossible

4x5 tintype in press camera
1 second exposure

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Day 7 - May 28th 2009

It Is Yet A Fiction
4x5 Pinhole Tintype
15 minute exposure

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Day 6 - May 27th 2009

Gently Colossal
4x5 Pinhole Tintype
11 Minute Exposure

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Day 5 - May 26th 2009

Something To Long For

4x5 Tintype in press camera

1/4 second exposure

Monday, May 25, 2009

Day 4 - May 25th 2009

Maybe Snow
4x5 pinhole tintype
3 minute exposure

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Day 3 - May 24th 2009

The Land Opens Up

4x5 pinhole tintype

6 minute exposure

I will have to learn to let go of perfectionism and understand not all 100 images will be what I had pre-visualized, this is a learning process.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Day 2 - May 23rd 2009

4x5 Tintype in Press Camera

1/2 second exposure

Friday, May 22, 2009

Day 1 - May 22nd 2009

Leon's Dream

4x5 Pinhole Tintype

8 minute exposure

Thursday, May 14, 2009

This blog is designed to share 100 photographic self-portraits I will create this summer. The work will be in collaboration with a small group of story writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, and programmers. Beginning May 22nd, I will make a photograph a day for 100 days. Each photograph is a self-portrait based on elements of the work being created by this group over these 100 days.

Welcome to 100 Days 2010

One Hundred Days is a summer collaborative project put into motion by artist volunteers.

Last year for 100 Days, I leapt into the tintype process, uncertain of how technically successful this venture would be and hopeful that I would master a new historical photographic technique. I had an amazing experience and felt I successfully met the challenge.

This year for 100 Days I plan to challenge myself by working with a photographic technique and image content that varies from my usual approach to photography. Since I generally work with historic processes and staged photography I plan to transition into digital photography for the summer.

I will create digital photographs in color. The content of the photographs will include a narrative which will unfold as the project progresses. To illustrate the narrative I will use found metaphors, deviating from my usual constructed metaphors which utilize personal prop-symbols.

In the end I hope to have a stronger relationship with my digital camera which surpasses our current love/hate relationship and a strengthened ability to find hidden stories and parallels to life within the everyday.

History of 100 Days

One Hundred Days is a summer collaborative project put into motion by artist volunteers. The history is pretty simple. The first One Hundred Days began as a collaboration between Carianne Garside and Steve Ersinghaus that resulted in a pretty cool book available on Blurb and wildly fun gallery showing at Tunxis Community College. Carianne painted a watercolor a day and I followed her painting with a poem interpreted from the painting. The joining was demanding, fun, a great opportunity to problem solve.

The 2009 One Hundred saw a larger project, which began everyday with a story written by Steve Ersinghaus and followed, this time, by Carianne Garside, as we decided to flip the 2008 procedure. We had fifteen other collaborators join in, from fiction writers, poets, photographers, designers, and programmers. That project can be found here.

For 2010, we’d like to continue the tradition with John Timmons starting off the summer work with a short film. It would be fantastic if people who’d like to take part in One Hundred Days 2010 chose to develop a daily project that follows John’s work or other work that develops from it. We’d love to see how a larger body of work develops, like a massive root and plant system from either the films or other work that develops from the daily films. In both years, self-constraint, like the confines of a sonnet, really opened up the flow. Sure, it’s the old rhizome metaphor. Remember, though, that Timmons is official starter text.

Here are some possible ways to proceed:

1. Follow the daily film, which will be available when the film maker uploads it his blog, and develop a work from it

2. Follow a person working with the film and develop a work from it, extending it, reshaping it in another form

3. Figure out a project and then work it back into the collective body of works in some way.

Bio

Jessica Somers is a photographer specializing in historic photographic techniques and self-portraiture.

Her interest in photography began at a young age by her grandfather's side as he took hundreds of photographs and with the invitation into her parents' late night printing sessions that were held in the bathroom transformed into a darkroom after sunset. At the age of seven she received a Kodak disc camera and has been making photographs ever since.

Jessica grew up in Wallingford, CT. She earned a B.F.A. in studio art and a minor in English from Albertus Magnus College in 1998 and an M.F.A. in Photography from The Hartford Art School in 2002. Her work has been exhibited nationally, has been published in Shots Magazine, F-Stop Magazine and the second edition of The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, by Christopher James. Jessica’s photographs can be viewed and purchased through the John Cleary Gallery in Houston, TX and Galerie BMG in Woodstock, NY. She currently teaches photography at Tunxis Community College and Central Connecticut State University.

100 Days Photographs