I've walked an odd line for most of my photography career. You see, all of my formal education is in fine arts; earning three degrees in eight years, all from majors that I have been told have no real world job prospects/applications. Yes, I navigated my way through eight years of classes that included topics such as Scandinavian Fine Handcrafts, Weaving, Marketing and Politics of Public Art, Typography, and many more that baffle and confuse non art majors who hear the titles. The fact that I took these classes or have three art degrees is not that odd. What is perhaps a bit unique is that I did all of this while working commercially in marketing. So you see I have all of my formal education in the fine arts but my working background is deeply rooted in public relations and marketing. It's this particular duality that I believe has heavily influenced the way I work, what my work looks like, and how I think about myself both as an artist and a marketing professional.
One of the core things I love about photography is its ability to show us a reality that cannot be perceived by or own eyes. It's this ability that drives me to shoot so often at night and has comprised a large percentage of my personal artwork. Oftentimes my artistic interests and my marketing job feel as though they live mutually exclusive lives. So it was something of a new mode of operation when I began thinking up ways to potentially capture campus, and came to the conclusion that perhaps bringing my love of blending fantasy with reality by taking long exposures of campus during the day may very well be a viable solution. Sometimes taking what you love about a medium and seeing if you can adopt and adapt that into other fields you are involved in can prove to be a fruitful endeavor. I don't know just quite yet if this is one of those times, but we're working on figuring that out.
These are the results of my first few attempts. It's a process I'm still learning, and hopefully refining/improving on over the coming months. It's still unclear whether from a marketing aspect we will ever find use for these images (sometimes my colleagues find this kind of stuff "too artsy") but in this line of work it's important to continuously experiment, think outside the box, and push yourself to see things differently.
