Project Proposal

Right now I’m photographing old mattresses that people dump on the street. I became interested in them through documenting the grime that my housemates live in especially in relation to very intimate objects. Has a mattress become so disgusting because it was so necessary and thus used as much as it possibly could have been? Or was it the opposite, neglect of the object? I’m also interested in the mattress itself as a reusable entity; what is it about mattresses that makes them so unappealing to have a used one when other items like clothing that have generally come to even more close contact with the body are so easy for people to come to terms with wearing used? I’m also interested in the prints that are on mattresses, the prints and colors no one sees until the mattress is dead in a gutter (which is why I need to photograph in color). I also love the human shapes they tend to take, the way they lean and bend in a tired sort of way. I am used a digital SLR to document these mattresses because I need to be able to shoot them on demand whenever I run into one because I have gone back to shoot a mattress and had it be gone, also this way I can shoot as many as possible and since the only camera I own myself is a digital that why I am using it. I have also been documenting the city and intersections where I find the mattresses and will maybe use that information to make a mattress-map or something else later on.

Because we are learning the 4x5, and medium format but I can’t really apply that to my current project I divulged separate projects I would like to also start. I would like to take portraits of the back of people’s heads. This would be a studio set up which seems good for a beginner user of the 4x5. In the past year I’ve become more acutely sensitive to relationship changes in my life. I’m interested in taking portraits of the back of people I was once close to (either in real rapport or in my mind (ie someone I looked up to but didn’t interact with much)). I’m thinking about how we lose memory of people that were once a part of our daily life, and when a break in a relationship is against our will or more natural- sometimes situations just cut us off from someone completely and sometimes we drift apart gradually. In this series I would have to contact and meet up with people whom I’ve lost touch with over the years. I would like it to be in color to differentiate more easily between the heads.

I have been spending a lot of time in the Sunset district of San Francisco. My boyfriend lives on the last avenue before the ocean so when I go to see him I am riding my bike pretty much the entire width of the City and seeing each avenue in the sunset. In the sunset there are no front lawns, and the front “yard” where normally you’d expect a lawn to be, is completely paved, few trees, and all the houses look the same. Ironically it is know as the area of the city that on one side is bordered by the beach on another, by Golden Gate Park, and inhabited by a lot of surfers and hippie-types who love to be outside. I would like to document in film (I’m thinking medium format) each avenue (the sunset is roughly defined as the streets numbered 2nd-48th Avenue) from Judah Street. Looking south from Judah, you can see all the way down each avenue for about 2 miles because it’s a grid set up. And, because of the earlier described qualities of this area, every photo would look quite similar.

These last two projects may not get started until after the senior show because of the time crunch.