Assignment 3 Proposal

This is one of the less impressive pictures I've taken with my trail camera in the past, but it's one that I was able to find readily. I liked it because on that night an orb weaver spider made a web right in front of the lens. 

After much deliberation, I have come up with an idea for Assignment 3 that I hope will have potential to evolve into a finished piece.  I intend to use my motion-activated trail camera to capture several series of pictures and then combine them into single images. I have always wanted to use my trail camera to make art and I am very excited to use it for this assignment. I like the concept of mapping information that is less traditionally mapped. The novelty is exciting.

One way that I might apply this idea would be to set my camera by the road for a while. I might capture, for three separate but related images, the garbage men collecting trash at night, the mail lady depositing letters in my mail box in the mornings, and the car and implement traffic throughout the day. The more interesting traffic on the road could be selected and cut into one picture, while a series of photographs of one event like garbage collection could be overlapped. These compilations might show interesting progressions or congruencies in their subject matter.

I do not plan to appropriate imagery for my project, but unless I end up using my trail camera for another subject, I will be using my own pictures of other people or people’s property. I would likely remove text and license plates present and blur or exclude pictures that included identifiable features of people to make sure my use would not be intrusive.

I was already playing with the concept of combining pictures from my trail camera for this assignment before seeing work from the example artists. However, some of the artists that we were shown, particularly Jason Salavon and Pelle Cass, have really helped me to develop the idea. They both work with combining the subjects of similar pictures, though they accomplish that in different ways. I couldn’t exclude the idea bouncing that I have had with my family, which has also been immensely helpful.