EA Photography

this may be my latest art project. or it may just be an interesting thing that i’m doing. it kinda blurs the line between art and life. but it’s definitely a life project. and it’s definitely interesting. so you should check it out!

The Book List

For my advanced directions class, my professor, Jacinda required us all to give a 25 min public artist talk, which was supposed to address our current thesis work as well as how we arrived at this body of work. Mine was received well (I thought), and people told me they learned a lot about me and my work, so I thought I would post a version of that talk on here. I hope it teaches you as much as it taught me just to give it. 

At this point in the talk I believe I rambled a little bit about seeing that cheap camera and neither my friend nor I wanting to drop the whole twenty dollars on it, so we split it, and after a few rolls of largely indiscernable underwater photos, the camera sat on my bookshelf for three years before something about recently finding the work of underwater magician Elena Kalis and the assignment to “do something different” came together in my brain and I came up with the underwater water goddesses….

Here, in the very first underwater photo shoot I ever did, is also the first project I did involving mythology (something i myself did not realize until i was putting this presentation together). Whatever part of me that is fond of horrible puns really liked the idea of finding water-related deities from different mythologies around the world and making portraits of them in their natural element. And thus, “portraits” of When-Zhong, Freyja, Naunet, and Tlaloc were created. After the legislative, bureaucratic people at the campus pool would only let me into the pool after the project was due, I started calling hotels with pools in Muncie. Luckily, I found one willing to let me and my models in. I ended up having to do a second, last minute shoot in Fort Wayne to supplement photos for the project, and it was then that I learned that not all hotels are as accommodating as the ones in Muncie. However, I also learned the valuable lesson of explaining the project, mentioning that I am a student, and planning in advance. All of these things would come in handy with the Pandora project.

It was also at this time, due to my history of photography class and the research project it generated, that I came to form the opinion that truth could be found in fiction. Though these were clearly not actual portraits of the goddesses, they were truthful portrayals of the myths and the characters as I understood them. This viewpoint would come to be central to my way of thinking and working. 

In the summer of 2010, I visited my cousins in California for the first time. It was not only my first time visiting California, but my first time on an airplane. And the first time I saw the Pacific Ocean…..

…and the first time I really just played with underwater photography. My cousin was a lifeguard at the pool in their addition, so for nearly half of the two week trip, we just went to the pool. I began to realize the effect the sunlight had under the water, as well as play with different vantage points and the distortions that occur just beneath the surface.

In the fall of 2010, when I returned to school, I remained fascinated by the effects of objects underwater. With a full sized swimming pool and warm california sunshine unavailable, I instead began working in fishtanks in my kitchen with studio lighting. I got the idea for a fishtank from an article I had read in an issue of Popular Photography back in high school, and of course tried to replicate. 

The magazine article talked about how to drop strawberries into a bowl (i had a fishtank) of sprite to achieve maximum bubbles. I did get strawberries, but I also tried it with grapes, oranges, and different backgrounds. 

This project represents the first time I really went looking for forgotten details in stories. The neverbird, for instance, is a fascinating detail from the story of peter pan that was overlooked by walt disney, and therefore has been left out of common knowledge. And not many people know that before snow white was offered a poisoned apple, the queen first nearly killed her with poisoned laces and a poisoned comb. The photos on the first fairy tales slide both represent different versions of the popular Cinderella story, though neither is taken from Disney’s version. One is ancient egyptian, and one is quite Grimm.  You could say that in some ways, this is where the Pandora project started, because this was the point at which I became fascinated with the idea of the less- well known stories that came before the popular versions. Everyone has heard of Neverland, but few have heard of the neverbird. 

The first time I did the project, in the fall, I was largely dissatisfied, so these photos are technically from the re-do that happened spring 2011.

By the end of the fall semester, the research on Armenian painter Ivan Aivazovsky (to whom I was drawn both for his romantic seascapes and for the armenian heritage we share) I was doing for my art history class, as well as the effects of inks in the fishtank (which was begun in the fairy tales) had been ruminating long enough to form a cohesive project. I took my favorite aivazovsky paintings, imitated the ships in simple black paint drawn with my finger (fingerprints were the birds), and tried to re-create the color schemes with ink dropped into water. This represents the beginning of my experimentation with mixed media, particularly inks and watercolor, though I certainly wasn’t using them in the traditional sense.

After working for an entire semester aaaaaalmost exclusively in miniature, I challenged myself (or maybe I was challenged) to create something life sized- to see what I could do with an entire corner. There happened to be an empty room in my house at the time, so I basically took over that room for a month or so while I worked on creating a romantic underwater scene sans water.

Using inordinate amounts of fishing line, wire, and duct tape, I shaped and hung the clothing and objects in front of a wall cheap print outs. The background consisted of photos taken at zoo aquariums pieced together to form a “coral reef.” With only a minimal amount of editing in photoshop, the shipwreck photos were done. 

It consisted of this large picture of the entire scene, supplemented with smaller detail shots of the objects from different angles, croppings, etc. 

And for four months they were all hung in the restaurant Paula’s On Main Street in Fort Wayne, IN, which was honestly an entire summer project in and of itself. 

After a long and bitter Indiana winter of being forced to attempt underwater photography indoors and with the glaring omission of water, I was itching to get back in the pool. After taking photos with my Nikon D200, however, and comparing their quality to the quality available with my 35mm film underwater camera, I knew something had to be done. So I took the plunge and bought a small olympus point and shoot digital camera with a DicaPac underwater housing, and any spare time I had over the summer, when not working or building the frames to hang the shipwreck photos, I convinced my friends to swim around in pools and let me take pictures. 

I’m very much the kind of person that learns by doing, so all this practice only taught me more about the effects of sunlight and time of day, how to position myself and the camera, how the water distorts things, and even how chlorine content can hugely effect the pictures. No two pools are created equally. 

In the fall, I returned to the photos from the summer. Only I was adding to them the idea of combining drawing (and maybe some watercolor) to give them another layer of meaning. I didn’t end up having time to fully flesh out any part of this idea for that semester, and I had also been told to “stick to my strengths, which is photography” Of course, this only made me more bound and determined to find some way to make it work. And here the very beginning of the Pandora project was born…

IF you haven’t yet heard the story of pandora’s box, it goes a little something like this: Prometheus favored humanity and wanted to give them the fire that Zeus was hoarding for the gods so they could improve their civlization. So, he stole fire and brought it to earth. Zeus was furious, and as punishment, he created Pandora, the first woman, to be the downfall of mankind. Her curiosity ultimately led her to open the mysterious box (which had been forbidden by zeus), thereby unleashing all manner of evils into the world. Sometime in the haze that was October to January, something clicked in my brain that this was basically the same story as the biblical Adam and Eve, with not only a remarkably similar plot, but also with a similar purpose: to answer the ancient question “where does evil come from?” At that point, I was hooked. I wanted to know everything I could about the myth of Pandora- where it came from, all its different versions, and how it related to other mythology. I also wanted to put it underwater. Into the realm that I had always subconsciously associated with myth and fantasy. A place where normal rules like gravity do not apply. I knew that if I could master the idea and technique of melding drawings and watercolors with photography, that I could heighten the element of fantasy even more effectively.

As I researched, specific lines of text from the story jumped out at me. These specific lines became the jumping off points for the photographs that make up part one of the Pandora project.

The second part of the project, and the bulk of what you see in the gallery today, is composed of somewhat abstract depictions of the “bad things” that Pandora may have let out of the box. Inspired by everything from the seven deadly sins, to lists in the Pandora story, to simply asking people “what are some evils?”, these photos most deal with the heart of the project. They are the evils that we have to deal with today. Whether Pandora, Eve, or ourselves are to blame for the human condition, this is it. Everyday everyone has to wrestle with evils like these. It’s no wonder that the ancient greeks devised a scapegoat like Pandora.

As I mentioned earlier, this project sort of evolved to include literary cousins of the Pandora story. This was never the original intention, but I can’t say I’m at all unhappy with the result. These cousins of Pandora make up the third part of the project; or maybe the epilogue. 

If I had an hour instead of 20 minutes, I could tell you all about how many almost college graduates it took to figure out how to take this picture when faced with the enigma: apples float.

Fitting since the whole project began with books and stories…

Using the masks to make the photo for “deception” quite by accident turned into an entire spin off photo shoot. So as soon as I finish the Pandora book, I will start working on editing and exploring this whole new series.

And to end, a behind the scenes shot of me at work. :)

Questions, comments, concerns? :)

Opening the Box: Exploring the Myth of Pandora

by Elise Rorick

Why do we, as humans, treat each other so often with malice, spite, and vindictive cruelty? Why do bad things happen to good people?  These are universal questions, ones that everyone from every age and race has grappled with since the beginning of time. This is evidenced by how many times this theme comes up in the folk tales, mythologies, and stories from every culture across the globe and is what I am exploring with this body of work.

Arguably the most well known explanation for the human condition is the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Perhaps the runner up for proposed explanations is the Greek myth of Pandora’s box. An abridged version of this story is that the god Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and brought it to Earth so that man could benefit from its warmth. Zeus was enraged and so he created Pandora, the first woman, who was a beautiful disaster. She was to be the downfall of man, for her insatiable curiosity was meant to unleash all of the evils with which we currently deal from the forbidden and infamous box.

Stories, particularly the story of Pandora, are how we as humans explore, explain, and examine the human condition. At its core, this is exactly what Opening the Box does as well, in a fabricated space not unlike mythic or fantastic worlds such as Mount Olympus or Middle Earth. It examines the myth of Pandora itself in its many versions, and more closely investigates possible evils that Pandora let out of the box.

Underwater photographs have always been reminiscent of some other realm. They are abstract and otherworldly. Sometimes eerie, but always ephemeral and magical, underwater photographs seem to be from, of, or about another reality, where earthly rules of physics do not apply. With the Pandora project, I am after this otherworldly effect.  I want the pieces to have the dreamlike, fluid qualities of underwater photography: the flowing fabric, abstract ripples and bubbles, and ethereal feeling. By adding the paint, I remove them from the context of the pool and place them instead in an ambiguous, universal “underwater” space- a fantasy space. The value of which is the same as the value of fantasy literature.

In the same way that fantasy authors create fictitious worlds in which to explore themes of the human condition, I am creating fictitious, fantasy spaces in which to explore the very same themes. With the Pandora project I am trying to explore the great mystical basis for truth in general; for humanity at its core, and life on earth. Though we have exponentially advanced our scientific understanding of the world since the time of Ancient Greece, I would argue that humanity as a whole is no closer to understanding questions such as “why is there evil?” Therefore, it bears going back to the roots of humanity and civilization, to all of the varying cultures that developed across the world, to look at the explanations they devised. Perhaps in this universal archetypal story can be found a commonality that provides at least a hint of the answer.

By creating imagery that does not directly illustrate, but rather is loosely based on Pandora and her literary cousins, in an imaginative space, with unique connections between stories, I hope to offer a new look at the human condition and all that it entails.