Digital Photos
Photographic Composition
Self-directed academic project
Tools: Digital camera, Adobe Photoshop
November 2019
This series came out of a photography assignment with one rule: take pictures of anything and multiply them into a composition. The challenge was making something that felt intentional rather than just repetitive. I ended up making four pieces, each one built around a different concept.
The first one, Flowers of Anxiety, started with a selfie. I erased everything except my face, then multiplied it and arranged the copies into the shape of a flower that’s spiraling inward, growing outward, and filling the frame. The goal was to make something that felt wrong even though it looked familiar. A flower is supposed to be comforting. A flower made entirely of one person's face staring back at you isn't. That tension was the whole point. It’s meant to exemplify anxiety growing in a way something organic grows, uncontrollably and in all directions at once.
The other three pieces follow a similar structure but shift the concept toward objects. For each one I picked two items that share a relationship and let them coexist in the same composition. The batteries and phone chargers are both about delivering power to something that needs it. The dumbbells and medicine ball are both about pushing the body past its limits. The boxing gloves and running sneakers are both about the kind of training that costs you something. The pairing matters. Without it, the compositions are just patterns.
The Flowers of Anxiety template turned out to be the strongest format, so I used it as the foundation for all four. But each piece has its own palette and energy based on what's in it.