TexasGirl Photography

This summer has been all about color for me.  The motivation for it was a 100 days project put on by my local arts council.  http://roundrockarts.org/call-for-art-round-rock-100-october-2015/  

I was resistant to the idea at first, mainly because I didn’t want to have the pressure of HAVING to make art and post about it on social media every single day, especially over the summer.  Usually I Instagram a photo daily, but I didn’t want to be mandatory, or related to a project.  What can I say, I don’t like being told what to do (childhood metaphors, anyone?).  

Then I started to realize that there weren’t a lot of rules.  I could make this project anything I wanted.  It didn’t just have to be about making art every day; I could give it a shape, a special meaning, I could let it grow and develop however it wanted.  I got permission to work on it quietly, I thought about it and wrote about it, and, as often happens, once I got started I was completely possessed by the whole thing.  All color.  All film.  All straight from my heart.  And – yay – all developed by the lab, including this wonderful thing called PRINTS!  

As the 100 days draw to a close – Labor Day weekend will be the end of it for me – I am starting to look at what I have made.  I am trying to wade through through the hundreds of images (because of course it wasn’t just one a day).  The project started as something intensely personal that I wasn’t even sure I would end up sharing, but it grew as my eyes looked further.  I was hungry for everything summer, not just the small private moments. There’s a lot of randomness, but overall I am happy with what I have made.  The prints included in this article probably won’t make the final cut; I’ll save those for later.

The end result will be several different series.  More importantly, the end result is my better understanding of color photography, which films I like for which situations, and which kinds of light.  It’s possible I won’t be able to exhibit any of this, since space is limited and I am not guaranteed a spot just for participating.  But it’s been so, so worth it.