My name is Dee Diaz, I am a Photographer and an Education Major. I make primarily experimental and mixed media work; I often utilize photographs and drawings in combination to make collage work. I like to blend together both digital and physical photographic processes. I too also consider myself to be a poet because I often use literary and visual elements as means of storytelling within and outside of my works. I have a master list that I have created throughout my 4 years here at NJCU of my favorite artists, but my rough top five at the moment would probably be Duane Michals, Nan Goldin, Wes Anderson, Debb Vandelinder, and Maggie Taylor. Other than that I draw much of my inspiration from my everyday life; I enjoy taking pictures or sometimes sketching things from around me that people might consider to be mundane like signs, lamp posts, potholes, etc. I also take a lot of inspiration from the internet mainly Instagram, Pinterest, and on the off chance a Reddit post of someone with a similar idea to mine. I would say a lot of my work is trial and error because sometimes the ideas that I want to work simply don’t and it’s back to the drawing board. My artwork is intimate often depicting my experiences and feelings being part of several minority groups; these are the things that I love, that hurt me, that I feel passionate about, and that are what makes me who I am.
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| Untitled - Cyanotype print |
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| Untitled - Vandyke print |
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| Collage PieceDMG - Digital Collage-Photoshop |
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| Untitled - Digital artwork |
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| Blue in The Face - Poem/Drawing-Sketchbook |
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| Hillary and Taro - Dawoud Bey 1992 |
Two quotes from Susan Sontag article
“The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.”
This quote stuck out to me towards the end of the reading because of how it brings light to the distortion that exists even in photographs that are often viewed as “mirrors” into reality. I often spend a lot of time creating images in various ways and having to sit at my computer or looking over multiple photos that like remotely the same. And then even after I have to choose different textures, blending modes, colors, etc to make an image that is fit to my internal image of the story I aim to create.
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power.”
There is a sense of power in the type of artwork I make. I photograph often different signs/posters/stickers that someone may have created, the gravel that someone laid for their pathway, trees that have been grown to add nature to a city, etc. It is inherently appropriation because I am utilizing things, places, objects, and more to fit my narrative that I am making that is most likely different than the original intended purpose of the subject. It does feel like knowledge and power because I am showing the viewers my way of seeing something they might or might not be familiar with a context that is most often completely different from the original purpose.
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