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.
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.
