Robin Hood

wire frame for Robin Hoods website

http://student.mica.edu/jwilliams01/robinhood/index

Choose your own ending story

http://student.mica.edu/jwilliams01/story/index.html

Things I wish I made

Jerry Spagnoli: Documentary Daguerreotypes



This body of work from Jerry Spagnoli has always interested me. His used of this older photographic process in a more modern digital age is amazing. This process sees events completely different they we are used to seeing documentary photography, especially not with digital photography.



Amy Stein: Domesticated

Amy Stein’s series of photographs titled “Domesticated”. These images completely changed the way I looked at my own images. To me her images say so much without force-feeding the viewer. The images are approachable from many different points of view without making one seem more right then the one before it. One could look at the images and think about how the growth of cities and urban areas has had an impact on wildlife and there natural environment. But the same images can make you reconsider the way we look at skin and fur as decoration. I know as soon as I discovered that the animals in the images where taxidermy it completely changed how I viewed the images. Before know this I tried to come up with how the images had been made, thinking it had been photoshop or trained animals but it didn’t cross my mind for them to be stuffed. Which for me was very interesting considering I’m an avid hunter.

Robert Frank: The American

I had a chance to view his series at the National Gallery last February and the exhibition blew me away. Robert Frank's "The American" is beautiful sequenced with four sections, all starting with an image of the American flag. This series truly captures American people and the place at the time. Above are a few of my favorite images from the series. I don't think that individually these images say what Frank says with the complete body of work, but they are my favorites as individual images.

In the middle of the exhibition, they showed a few of his contact sheets. It was great to see how he edited down to 83 from around 28,000. Seeing his editing and sequencing definitely made me reevaluate my own sequencing. It was also helpful to see how he cropped some of his images and how much of an impact that made on the image and the series. This made me think about how I shoot and my reaction to the initial image on the contact sheet or on the back of the digital camera. Sometime I feel like what I see is what I get, but really its what I have to edit even further.

Robert Frank really put his grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to amazing use.

First Assignment

Above are some images from a two part series I completed last year about my relationship with my grandfather and my great-grandmother. When I was younger I used to travel with my grandfather to West Virginia to visit my great-grandmother up until she passed away when I was in high school. My grandfather now owns her house and I've visited it since she has past but I hadn't taken the time to look at it photographically. With this series I wanted to document and explore my great-grandmother's house and my relationship with it, her and my grandfather.

After completing a series of ten images, I noticed the strong reaction my grandfather had to the images and decided to use this to create a book. I started by giving my grandfather prints of the ten images and a tape recorder and asked him to tell me anything the images reminded him of. He talked about 5 of the images for a total of 2 hours. I then narrowed his comments down and created the hand made book you see above.

Above are a few images of a piece I created and installed at the Meyerholf Symphony Hall. This piece was four feet tall by 20 feet long and made up of multiple prints. I had the chance to work with Ellen a violinist in the BSO and photograph her violin for this piece.

The statement Live to Ride, Ride to Live is one that most bikers come to live by, but at the same time most people who don’t ride don’t understand it. Growing up seeing and hearing my grandfather, my uncle and my dad take off or show up on there bikes I never really understood what riding meant to them. In June of last year, I started riding and quickly began to understand.
After riding about 6,000 miles in three months, I’ve started to notice a subculture that I had no idea was as big as it is. Everything from weekend riders to Hells Angels to Custom builders to part time bike mechanics and everything in between. And no matter how different the individuals are they are all tied together by the fact that they ride motorcycles. It’s intriguing for me to see the wide variety of people who ride and how outside of riding how different they can be. On top of the people being individuals this is shown even more in the bikes and all the custom parts riders add on to make it there own, like my father how I think would rather wash his bike instead of ride it sometimes.
I was interested in photographing this subculture to help myself and others understand it. I wanted to photograph individuals or small groups to show their depth into the motorcycle lifestyle and who they are as an individual shaped by this lifestyle.