week 10

Hi everyone!

Well, I'm back in Arizona and its heavy heat and dry air. So far I'm loving it, but it's hard to believe just a day ago, I was almost halfway across the world, eating baguette and talking fashion with my advisor. But I'm glad to be back.

Just before I left, I met with my advisor for our last official meeting to go through my photos and pick the few that had potential. I would be lying if I didn't say it wasn't somewhat painful. I was never a fan of letting other people see my art, and I'm not the best photographer so watching my advisor and model (I wanted her to be as much part of the process as my advisor was) go through my photos and pick ones over the others was confusing and painful. I had no idea what I was suppose to be looking for or what to say, and again I was reminded just how much precision and work it takes for those few-out-of-hundreds fashion photos to be created and printed out for an audience. I do see a change now in the way I look at pictures in a magazine: I look at the background, the clothes, the stance, the expression and imagine the environment behind the the camera (photographer, photographer's assistance, lights, stylists, more assistances, ironing boards, makeup cast, etc) as much as I look at the convenient prettiness of each photo. I think about, wow how long must it have taken to get that picture of a girl running down a sidewalk with a parachute attached to her back, and have it fully open so it's colors nicely contrasted with the background and clothes? (hours, my advisor responded, shaking her head)

We also went through some of my advisor's work. I wanted to get a look at what she had done and figure out, firstly, how much freedom I had with these photos, and secondly, how she decided to tell her "narrative." It was really amazing to see what she had done. She told me stories of happenings behind the scenes of the photos and for me, I could suddenly see everything in each look come to life, like each photo had a real purpose and wasn't another perfectly composed photo of some beautiful person.
While it's true there's that stereotypical idea of fashion people being very...arrogant and picky in the fashion industry, what they create when all the little pieces come together is most definitely art, and I'm just grateful I got to see a glimpse of it.