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Tuesday, December 22, 2015

With All My Heart

Back when I was in college I discovered Julia Margaret Cameron thanks to one of my photography professors.  I immediately fell in love with her work, because it included a lot of the things I already loved: Pre-Raphaelite sensibilities, a penchant for raw, feminine portraits, and soft hazy atmospheres. One of my favorite artists at the time was Waterhouse because of the way he drew inspiration from Greek Mythology and Shakespearean characters, but Cameron was the female photographer equivalent and I was amazed by the images I started pulling up in Google. Finding female artists in the Victorian era, especially such famous ones is not so common. She photographed quite a few of the prolific poets and other "celebrities" at the time including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lord Alfred Tennyson, and even Alice Liddell, so she was highly respected by her peers at the time. I felt an immediate kinship with her mind and artistic process, and, going to a conceptually oriented art school, that wasn't something I felt a lot with the modern and contemporary artists we most often studied. When Chelsea asked if I was free to shoot with her again, I jumped at the opportunity but it took me a little bit longer to decide that I wanted to make a shoot emulating Cameron.  I'd done work in college based off of her photographic style, but it had been about 5 years, and my mind was telling me that I needed it again.  I also hadn't worked with 35mm film in awhile so I pulled out my Minolta as well as a Yashica-D my grandmother found in her attic and my usual variety of Polaroids. This shoot even has some digital mixed in, but I'd like to think the 120mm, 35mm, and digital all blend pretty well together, unless you're looking at the grain up close perhaps! This shoot was unbelievably relaxing, and despite Cameron and I's processes being much different, I'd like to think the easy, relaxed pace of the day was something that Cameron would have experienced on her shoots as well. The shoot is all styled with vintage clothing from my collection that I thought had a Julia Margaret Cameron feel, and I even got to practice weaving roses into braids and making my own flower crown out of some wildflower vines!

"With All My Heart," featured in Dreamingless Magazine

Model: Chelsea Mourgan Brooks
Impossible 600 B&W round-framed film, shot with Polaroid Impulse
fp3000b film inverted negative, shot with Polaroid 100



fp3000b film, shot with Polaroid 100
Tri-x 400 120mm film, shot with Yashica-D


Tri-X 400 120mm film, shot with Yashica-D
fp3000b inverted negative, shot with Polaroid 100
fp3000b inverted negative, shot with Polaroid 100