wear i where my shoes: where: the airport- chicago, illinois

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

where: the airport- chicago, illinois

where are you going: portland, oregon

where did you start: norfolk, virginia

where are you from: washington state

name: alexa

age: 15

why did you wear these shoes:

"they're my favorite,"

and they're comfortable.

Location:

At the Starbuck's counter near departure gate 31 at Chicago O'hare Airport.

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the viewing GUIDE

a SHOE documentary?

This is photographic project that documents not just shoes, but the person in the shoes.

These encounters are brief moments of insight, into WHERE a person is going and why they have chosen to WEAR these shoes for their journey.

A much more broad spectrum of content ended up in this collection than I had originally intended. At first, I was compelled to photograph unusual, unexpected or unreasonable combinations of shoes-and-people I had been noticing while traveling through airports.

Suddenly I found my idea evolving in many directions. I soon wanted to photograph a person to represent every place that I was traveling to and relay the frequency of how often my whereabouts would change, even in a day.

I'd also become fascinated with finding people who were coming or going to a far off place, making their destination and journey the subject of interest more so than the shoes they'd selected to wear.

In some cases, I just came across interesting people whom I then wanted to take a picture of and happened to have a very convenient excuse to capture that encounter with an image. I reasoned to myself that if the person was interesting, the shoes were therefore interesting. Right?

Despite the motivation becoming diverse, I do think that I did hold on to (even if loosely,) the common theme of WHERE people are going and why they've chosen to WEAR those particular shoes.

A much more authentic commonality is that this collection of people and shoes came into being through my own travels from here to there. Each person represented here is someone who literally crossed my path in the course of a day or a trip.

Although I was intentional about observing my surroundings and the people who would pass me by, I didn't ever go out of my way to solely "search" for subjects. I did not carve out time in my schedule to sit on a bench or go to a public area and just wait for an opportunity to photograph an interesting person or pair of shoes.

In many cases, these encounters came as a result of the unexpected circumstances in a day- delayed flights, getting lost in an unfamiliar city, taking curious turns down a new street, stopping somewhere for lunch. I'd say that some of these meetings were even serendipitous; a concept you become more aware of when you notice the flow of each day and the people you intersect with as a result.

Along the way I discovered that many shoes represent a person's own story book- life experiences, exotic travels, the journey of one's soul from one place to the next. Those stories in and of themselves are their own documentary; perhaps a further evolution of this wandering idea for the future.

the TRIALS of ERROR

They're a little bit dark and a little blurry...

In photography, you learn by experience- commonly known as trial and error.

I've referred to it though as the trials of error, because an error in judgement can create very painstaking circumstances later on or be detrimental to the final outcome.

In some photography settings there are opportunities to make corrections, but in much of my photographic endeavors there are no second chances.

During this project I made some choices that gave me a lot of grief in the end. Oh, how I wish I could have the chance to do it again and eliminate those mistakes!

I chose to use an older camera that did not have a light meter reading to view the exposure scale. Although I was compensating for this by using the exposure lock, it was only after developing all the rolls that I saw that my original exposure settings which I had "locked," were actually changing between each frame of my sequence.

The result: instead of the sequence having the same exposure, each frame got exposed differently and produced under and over-exposed images (too dark or too bright.)

I also shot this collection on film, in part because my digital camera body is not full frame and I really wanted my 50mm lens to be a 50mm lens. I also wanted to have consistency in the appearance of the images and so I was eliminating the option of changing the ISO or White Balance that digital cameras so conveniently provide.

That reasoning backfired because I could not control the light or always find more suitable lighting in such a limited amount of time. Shooting digital could have allowed me to compensate for these varying settings. I hadn't picked a higher film speed that would be more sensitive in so many of the poorly lit areas I found myself shooting in and so I was often having to shoot at less than 1/60th of a second all the way down to 1/4 sec. A perfect equation for either dark or blurry images. Sigh.

Shooting with film however created an atmosphere of anticipation, because neither I nor the participants had the opportunity to have instant feedback. I found this exciting and mysterious, unlike the instant gratification of digital photographs.

One drawback of not having "instant" feedback though was not seeing mistakes immediately and potentially having the chance to correct them. In this project I did not notice until after the fact that my equipment was not doing what I thought it was doing.

But I cannot point all the blame on the limitations of my equipment or film speed. My errors in judgement were largely impart to being nervous and the lack of experience that accompanies trying something new! I could have minimized most of my technical errors and improved my compositions had I not let my own nervous feelings be prompting me to rush and thus distract me from being attentive to my camera settings and the environment around me.

It is disappointing to see how my mistakes affected the outcome of all these images; moments in time which I will never have a second chance to photograph or correct again. I see so many ways that these images could have been better. Yet it's because of my mistakes that I will learn how to improve and how to sharpen my abilities as a photographer.

Even though there were so many shortcomings and technical errors in this project, they are outweighed by the satisfying accomplishment that I was able to connect with perfect strangers, who then allowed me to capture and share in a moment of their lives. In the end, this is what I've enjoyed and what allows me to feel as though I succeeded as a photographer.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

where: the airport- chicago, illinois

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the viewing GUIDE

a SHOE documentary?

the TRIALS of ERROR

the TOOLS

the photographer's shoes

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Email: weariwhere@yahoo.ca

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