Week 5: Obsession #1

So, as it turns out, this week's prompt is not obsession. I guess since it can be anything, I'll go ahead and talk about obsession and light.

My entire room is white. Last year, I painted my room dove grey and painted my furniture navy blue and bright orange- some of you probably remember. When I signed my new lease, I was told I couldn't paint the walls, so I painted all my things to match the walls. I went as far as to reupholster my desk chair and make a new cover for my lamp, bleach certain textiles, etc. It became an obsession. Every spare moment I had I was painting a flower pot white, dipping coffee cans into white wash, sanding my furniture, you get the idea. Also, I've got an obsession with found objects, and if you don't count the antique hall tree I bought as a set piece, all of the furniture in my room probably cost 10 dollars combined- most of it was free. Community theatre teaches you how to design on a dime, I guess. Now that it's done, I take pictures of it.

I'm obsessed with the environment as a study of texture and light, as well as a social study of sorts, of whiteness as an imposition on pre-existing texture. White,as a social concept, covers things up and blends things in.  Clearly, I could talk about this all day, but let me get to the light in this photograph. The environment allows me to observe and obsess over the light. I notice what color it is at different times of day- how the hue of my room changes with the weather, time of day, and season.

I'm particularly obsessed with this one little piece of my room. Where my white lamp sits on a sideways white trunk beneath my white lace curtains beside my white pillow behind my white chair. Anyhow, I'm obsessed with watching the light come in through the curtains and hit these objects and bring out the textures. These photographs were all take at the same time [4:00 pm.] , at approximate exposures of +1, 0 and -1.

Whats amazing to me is the change in which information develops into the frame based on where I metered. In the first image, the whole left half of the image is clear. It's a picture about a pillow. The middle image [0] is a photo about a lamp. My eye is drawn to the sheen on the surface on which the lamp sits, and the curves of the lamp itself. The third image is the only image in which I can see the patterns in the curtains. In this one, we get no information from the left half of the photo. We can't see that the room is white, but when observed carefully you can see the leaves of my tree outside. Depending on how much light I allowed onto the scene, my subject and focus totally changed.