your skeleton is yellow

and mine is green.

35 mm store brand disposable

Fibs? They're so easy to tell

and so easy to use!

you come beating

like moth's wings.

Tony. 35 mm disposable

New Year

small sample of pictures from winter break.

Early December

The photo place fucked up my photos.

But I sort of enjoy it.

And they were free.

35 mm slide film

your just a mirror

Color Photo Final: 1000 Words

Artist Statement

Michelle Peterson

This semester started with a project on visual memory. I wanted to use my images to portray how memory appears in an incomplete, sometimes exaggerated story. It is something fragmented, and overlapping. The mind does not replay a memory in a linear, chronological order that the event may have happened in. Instead, memory is sporadic. It dulls over time but still has attention to specific, sometimes odd, details.

For the body of work, I experimented with different mediums, and kept my cameras by my side at all times. When an instance started to stand out to me and have a personal emotional value, I would shoot multiple frames of that moment. With the use of multiple angles I would then create a photographic collage, with the images projecting and receding into space at different levels. The color palled would be soft and subdued.

All the while focusing on this project, I would candidly shoot pictures of my husband, whom was often accompanying me on my adventures. These images started just as personal keepsakes. Hiding within each roll of film are a handful of these shots. Upon looking through my negatives at the near end of my shooting, I discovered these snapshot images of my husband packed an emotional punch for me. Not only that, but I found them the most aesthetically pleasing, and value them for their strong use of color.

I decided to use these images as the basis of my theme. I believe they are the images that best demonstrate my growth with the use of color mediums. Before this semester, I had never shot with color film before. I became interested in experimenting with different types of film. I shot with slide 120 film with my Holga camera and Canon film camera, and also shot with one time use disposable cameras with fixed flash. I was interested in the way colors would be portrayed differently in the different mediums. It is in the images of my husband, where I was less focused on capturing a defining moment to recreate in a photographic sense, that I was experimenting with my use of color.

One morning after deciding to change my final topic, my husband broke the news to me he wants a divorce. Nothing happened, other than his need to be free. He moved here, and doesn't feel like this place is home. In the weeks I decided to use these images of him, I had seen this coming, which is why the images are so important. They are a visual diary of the emotion I felt I saw in him. It is a body of work that is so personal in every aspect, but I hope that it has the power to show viewers the same feeling that I had derived being in the moment.  

Experimenting in color

A small collection of photos for my color photo class. My original intent for this class was to focus on the subject of visual memory, as I am doing with my film work, to help me get a better grasp of the concept from a color perspective. The project started out fine until I discovered slide film and got lost in the new medium to the point where my original idea kind of faded away, and I began to focus more on just shooting. Many of the images circle around my husband and my relationship with him and friends, and the images of him are some of my favorite. I may, for once, just keep it simple. My new subject matter may just be candid extended portraits of him with focus on color and tonality to create a mood. I really just feel like doing this simple and directly. Save my shenanigans for the darkroom. I will post more pictures soon.

 Kodak disposable

 Kodak disposable

 Tmax100 35mm

 Kodak disposable

Kodak disposable

Tmax100 35mm with paper filer over lens

miss you.

my mema and papa both have alzheimer's.

papa turned just turned 73.

when we lit the candles on the cake to sing

they didn't know who was supposed to blow them out.

and mema wouldn't stop asking about our home movies the whole time

and while i watched the 8 year old me run around on the screen

i caught the saddest longing in her eyes

that i couldn't stop thinking about for days.