Miniscapes

 "Aerial View of Black Desert"

 "Maple Mountains"

 "Gold in the Garden"

"Catastrophe"

When I was around seven years old, I remember my grandmother handing me her drugstore disposable camera to document her sixtieth birthday. I remember her bragging on my eye for composition to many people after seeing the results. Before social media and computers were really a thing in my life, I actually did go through old photo albums pretty regularly. Personally, I think that was the hieght of photography. Several Christmases ago, I got a pretty nice digital camera that I obsessed over for a few years. Since then, I've had a falling out with photography, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps its the plethora of photos on the internet that have fallen prey to vanity, or the fair amount of uncreative photography I've seen that is so bad that it suffocates my own desire to create via camera. Whatever the reasons, my falling out has resulted in my photo stream being cluttered only with pictures of homework problems, powerpoint slides and professors' office hours. All this to say, my photography above is a little dated.

"Miniscapes" was my AP art portfolio backup plan. I took a some of these shots a few summers ago in a forest in Sweden, and one ("Maple Mountains") at the Grand Canyon National Park. I like the concept of small things pretending to be great platforms for life. Dollhouses fascinated me as a kid and they still do. I have once been much quicker at seeing the details and appreciating the whole more. Observing the often overlooked gives me a fresh perspective on how I view things I see all the time. Really, that is the powerpunch of photography that many people have missed.

-M