week 13 Damon Casarez

This is the first photo of a project that I have been wanting to start for a couple terms now and have finally made one image for it. This project is based on social networking websites, but myspace specifically. I'm interested in how people choose to represent themselves for the world wide web and what these representations say about my generation. This photo was created after a 15 year old girl's myspace photo I found when I was browsing around one day. This is a pretty accurate representation of her profile picture. I took a screen grab for the picture view layout and added the picture I had my friend take on her laptop mimicking the 15 year old girls photo.

Over the past year or so I have been collecting photos/screen shots of random public myspace/facebook profiles. I have noticed several trends in how people photograph themselves solely for their profile picture and also have seen different "characters" that I have found over and over again. Some of the characters I've often seen are black dudes holding wads of cash, so-cal bro's doing beer bongs/smoking weed, emo boys in the bathroom with eyeliner, lonely teenage suburban girl, the young girl who posts very sexual pictures of her self , "gang bangers," and a couple of grandma's trying to keep up with their grandkids by being on myspace. I'm fascinated by what photos these people choose to put up and what the photograph says about them and the digital generation in general. I'm always thinking about this project and what way to approach it and still haven't settled on a specific direction. I'm glad I did one photo though, just to test it out and see what people think about it.

WEEK 12 Damon Casarez

Red Cups

Grafiti

More Tagged Rocks

This is the 2nd day I shot for my Azusa Canyon Project. I went for about 5 hours this time and walked a few miles and still saw a bunch of garbage around. It usually dies down after the 1st mile, but not here. These photos are a little more subtle than the first post from the series. It was refreshing to just get out and shoot with no schedule, lighting set up or people to deal with. There is 20 photos that will be in the book all shot in Azusa Canyon, mostly around the areas surrounding the San Gabriel River, which has a North, West and East fork in the river

Week 11 Damon Casarez

Painted Rock

Trash Bag

Party Tray

This is a new series of landscape photographs I started last week for my 2nd book for design 2. This project is documenting the landscape of Azusa Canyon in the Angeles National Forest. I've been going here for a few years now for the fishing and because its a nice get-away spot thats only about 40 min away from me. When I first came to the canyon about 4 years ago, I was shocked at how beautiful it was for being so close to L.A. and the fact that there is a natural flowing river in L.A. County with fish. When I really started to explore the canyon, I immediately noticed the garbage and graffiti from people who hang out at the river with family or friends or camp there. I was so sad and shocked to see all of this trash polluting the river and the graffiti on the rocks, that will be there forever.

I photographed the Canyon according to how I first experienced it 4 years ago, being taken away by its beauty but always seeing the trace of human beings upon take a closer look. The human trace is supposed to be a second read in the photographs. I intentionally photographed the landscapes in a very traditional manner to not only focus on the trash/graffiti, but definitely showing my awareness of it in the photographs. Some photographs are more subtle than others. This was the first day I went to shoot for the project.

WEEK 10 Damon Casarez

This is the next photo in my series of staged photographs. This image was inspired by my own family dinners haha. I thought it was a sort of humorous photograph about the modern American family. I wanted to make this photograph for a while now and finally got a family to shoot. It was a pretty simple shot. I didn't do much variation because I knew this was the shot I wanted to get. The lighting was pretty simple, only using 1 4-bank kino flo to light them. The best part was eating all of the pizza after!

WEEK 8 Damon Casarez

These are 2 photos I shot this weekend for my series of staged photographs. I have been wanting to do both of these scenes for a while now and I ended shooting the 1st one Saturday afternoon in downtown L.A. on the 6th street bridge and the 2nd at a market parking lot in Pasadena. Both images are a sort of social commentary on our uses of technology. I feel that both of these images are of situations that most people have seen or can imagine seeing happening in real life. I wanted to create documentary photographs of these situations in a sort of neutral manner to leave the narrative up to the viewer.

Week 7 Damon Casarez

This is the newest photo in my series of staged photographs. I saw a couple in Altadena about 3 weeks ago sitting on a bus stop bench together similar to this photo and I knew right away that I was going to re-stage it. I'm interested in the visual oddity of the situation and where the traditional roles in the relationship are switched. I'm not trying to poke fun at this situation, but simply re-create the nice tender moment I saw between the two.

This shoot was a lot of fun. I had 5 people on the shoot; 2 actors on the bench and 3 background people. I also had a friend majoring in theater costume design help me pick clothing for the shoot.

Week 6 Damon Casarez

These are two of the better shots for fashion this week. I have been struggling in this class for the last 5 weeks and I have finally shot some images that I like. Paul has been insisting that I have more movement and narrative in my photos, both for fashion and my personal work. I finally showed him a couple books of photographers that I look at and he was glad I brought some work and he understands what I like now. I don't shoot a lot of movement in my photographs, but I always try to include narrative. I included the lights and cords in the shot to add a bit a narrative to the shot.

Damon Casarez: My thoughts on his artwork

Damon Casarez

Damon's work is has a quiet stillness, an open ended storyline that asks you to go into the image and let yourself wander about the subject's life, their view point.

One of my favorite New Wave Japanese directors Yasujirō Ozu, his style was to use direct cuts to scenes, no fade outs; his camera would lingeron a softly blowing curtain, leaving the viewer to slowly experience the moment. Damon captures the same moments in his photography, capturing quiet emotional moments.

Damon Casarez

Footnote: to read about Yasujirō Ozu go here

Week #1 Damon Casarez

This is the latest photograph in a series I have been working on for about a year called Observations. For the past year or so I have been keeping track of all of the strange, ridiculous, and dreary scenes I have seen while in public and later photographing them and tweaking what actually happened or shooting it exactly as I saw it. The photographs aim to have a documentary feel to them, as if I happened to have a camera and shoot these people and situations without the subject knowing. The series is meant to have an underlining message in each photograph or simply they act as documents of the phenomena of the situation.
This shot was a made up situation that I had imagined and photographed a couple weeks later after choosing props, wardrobe, location, casting a child actor and finalizing the shoot day and time. This photograph to me is just one example of how technology has infiltrated our daily lives and how our society is so obsessed with mobile devices. I imagined a child left alone in a shopping cart at a grocery store while the mother went to other aisles to grab more items while the video game acts as a baby sitter for the parent and child in this photo. This is the 3rd photograph in the series that has to do with mobile devices and how, when and where we use them in public and what their use has to say about our current society.