Project 2-Histories of Things.

The following six photographs derived from a project in which we documented two objects among a plain background and a conceptual background. I chose my found object in America’s Thrift Store, a discarded AT&T 100 touchtone telephone. I wanted to key in on the disconnected society of today. Cellphones, unfortunately, allow its users to do many things at once while talking on the phone. For example, people drive and talk on the phone. These cell phone conversations hold no value with life’s many distractions. It is as though we need this cord to tie us down and keep us connected to each other. In both conceptual backgrounds, I focused on placing the telephone within a grid in which the phone becomes an integral part of these connected lines.

For my personal property, I chose a Hamilton lettering wooden desk drawer. This object possesses the documentation of the drastic change in lettering and the discarded use of physically created documents. I wanted to remember the process. In one conceptual background, I set the drawer within a spot of light among darkness, the other dark among light. These represent the lost and found. the use and non-use of this drawer. The image in which the drawer is set in shadow, reveals a line of garbage bags behind a barred wall. The drawer is suggestively sinking into the shadows by moving toward the background (the trash) as the natural process of documentation is almost nonexistent. In the other conceptual photograph, the drawer sits on an old wooden trunk in a spot of light and in the background an open door reveals a beam of natural light. The drawer is being idolized as a positive view of the natural documentation in the past.

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