My themes are around two categories. One is for my long-term documentary photography project ”Habitats" , I looked at works that are related to the concept of people dealing with their private spaces. Some of them I get advice from school. Some of these artists' works have influenced me for a while alrealy. So I looked at how Tina Barney takes portraits of her family and friends and sort of staging the scene to tell stories. Also, the concept of not having people in the space but reveal their characteristics is something I’m interested in. There is a photographer took photos of empty hotel rooms in the US and made a photo book. I was really drawn by the images of empty rooms and how each room is having a story behind it. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the photographer’s name since it was 5 years ago. Instead, I found Gulia Dini’s work has a similar approach in exploring under this concept, so I include her in my post. ‘“On the nest” is a photobook I saw during an exhibition in Beijing in 2018, The artist frames the couples in the space with their eyes directly looking at the camera, which is a powerful and simple method of taking people’s portrait, and the room complete the information on the person that is the owner of the room but not present in the images. That inspired me on trying to have my subjects to look directly at the camera and to capture the powerful moments. The works of “Onago room” and “Color project” were works that I have been influenced at the beginning of making my works. They are visually appealing to me and they all focused on certain group of people, which gives me ideas to narrow down my subjects to international students. I also would like to look at painters who also capture the moment of people dealing with their own spaces, Edward Hopper’s work keeps getting into my mind when I make my works. The colors and contrast are giving me ideas to experiment on using color gel flash in my images.
My second category is Alternative processes. There are a lot of alternative photographic processes that artists still practicing today. My main practice will be researching on using gum bichromate to produce hand-made prints. Gum bichromate is a 19th-century photographic printing process based on the light sensitivity of dichromates. It is capable of rendering painterly images from photographic negatives. Christan Z Anderson is an artist who mastered this process, so her works are mostly what I will look at. But also by researching artists who are practicing alternative processes, I would also like to include other processes in my posts. In this way I get to see as many different artists approach in image production. It makes it easier to locate what type of images might work for certain processes.