Brad Jamula

My work explores our symbiotic relationship with the urban environment by looking at how it affects us and, in turn, how we attempt to effect change. By moving through the city and using photography as a record of that movement, I want to question how space is constructed and how we inject ourselves into that space, either physically, or through images and mark-making.
I aim to investigate and compare how we influence urban spaces, and analyze the relationship between documentary photography and public imagery. By drawing on my own understanding of the city and my use of photography as a means of study, I hope to make larger connections between society’s experience of the evolving urban landscape and its efforts to create a more personal expression of community within that environment.

Dimitra Ermeidou in "Places of memory - Fields of Vision"

Dimitra Ermeidou is participating in the exhibition Places of memory - Fields of Vision as a member of the art project Visual March to Prespes. The show is part of the main program of the Festival of the Invisible Cities, organized by the State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA), Thessaloniki, Greece.

Joe Hocker

In a time in my life where little is steady, my experience of nature is eternal and unwavering. The places I go to make my photographs are preserved land. These places remain intact, short of the ebb and flow of all things in the natural world. It’s important for me to preserve memories and images of the things that are stable. Nature has always played a large role in my ability to find comfort and solace.

Being in nature brings about spirituality, allowing me to be enveloped by the wonder of the natural world and to capture that essence. While experiencing these spaces I move slowly, exploring and making photographs. These photographs are made as a reminder of the grandeur of the nature and to invite the viewer to explore these places, or places like them, for themselves.

Rebekah Flake

      

The Boy Soldiers series depicts American children at play. Specifically, the photographs show the young participants of organized battle reenactments. They clutch their weapons, they fall down dead, they confront the camera with bravery. I am interested in how patriotism gets passed down through generations in the United States. To what extent and through what mechanisms are our natural impulses to tell stories and perform war games developed and/or hijacked while we are still young? Is a re-enactor child equipped with a cultivated historical consciousness or an inoculation against the sights and sounds of battle to the point of being desensitized to the gravities of war?

Open Studio Tours

This year’s MFA Open Studios were a smashing success for the Photo Department.  It was a lively day filled with family, friends, and fellow artists.  We had a good selection of work hanging outside the grad seminar room in our Triangle Gallery, highlighted by an interesting multi-media piece exploring Civil War reenactment by Rebekah Flake.  We deployed some trickery by luring people into our studios with Federal Donuts and Joe Hocker’s specially brewed coffee, but once they were here and we started talking about art the interaction exceeded our expectations.  It gets kinda lonely down here in the basement sometimes, and it was nice to feel so connected to everyone, if only for a weekend.  Thanks to everyone who took the time to stop by…see you next year!

Dimitra Ermeidou

The Stryker Bullet Series

In the Stryker Bullet Series photo-installation I combine and repurpose rejected photographs,
created by the Farm Security Administration Photography Project, during the years of the Great Depression. The black holes of the punched negatives become a metaphor for the violent impact of the Depression on human lives. The feelings of instability, fear and despair that rise in the threat of a similar financial crisis today imply a close connection of the historical imagery with contemporary audiences. Additionally, the lack of image information gives out more clues than is supposed to, about the role of censorship and politics in troubled times, questioning at the same time photography's documentary function.

Information about the source material

This series is made of high-resolution digital scans of unidentified 35 mm negatives that were created between 1935 and 1939. They are part of the FSA Photographic Archive in the Library of Congress, consisting of almost 145,000 photographs that were commissioned by the government agency of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. Roy E. Stryker headed the project, which included photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The aim was to document the worker’s hardship and the nation’s conditions at the nadir of the Depression, distributing at the same time free images for use in newspapers and publications.

Although not a photographer himself, Stryker planned out specific shooting scripts and was
responsible for reviewing the exposed negatives and selecting the ones that would be printed.
His authority was more evident in the way he treated the rejected negatives: he would punch
holes into them, deleting parts of the image and making them unusable for reproduction. Around 68,000 negatives were rejected and listed as “Killed”. His punch is thought to have reflected not only his editorial preferences, but also the Roosevelt Administration ideology.

Grads with the undergrads

As grad students, we are often interact with the undergrads. Taking the time to talk about our work as well as the work of the undergrads. We're active in the critiques as well as demos sharing our insights and passing along or knowledge of the medium.

We're still getting rolling with this blog but we have a backlog of activities we've been up to.  A few weeks ago we had a chance to talk to the seniors about our work and our backgrounds and take questions. Yesterday we took a trip to NYC to check out the Faking It show at the Met and to check out some other galleries and the PhotoPlus expo. Hoping to get some pictures and maybe some reviews up soon.

Tuesday is our Undergrad Critique, a great way for the undergrad and grads to engage in conversation about their work.  We'll have some pictures from that soon, too.

Senior Seminar with Rebecca Michaels while the MFA students in Photography present their work

 Photo Process Workshop at Martha Madigan's studio

Welcome!

Welcome to the Tyler Photo MFA blog, the freshest outlet for information about the grads, what we are making, looking at, reading and in general what we're doing. So get yourself a cup of coffee and try to keep up.