One of the final classes within my MFA program at the Academy of Art University was “Plastic and Pinhole Cameras”. I developed a large body of work along the coastline of Northern California for this class that I call “Out of the Blue”. I have included the artist statement and some of the images from this series.

Out of the Blue focuses on the sea. More specifically, I embarked on a photographic study of the widely varied northern California coastline. My intent with this body of work was to strip the San Francisco Bay area’s cliff, beach and coastline areas down to their essential components. I chose not to include many large elements such as architecture or people within the frame. While small remnants of these subjects may appear within the frame, the goal was to pull the viewer’s focus to the sand, surf and sky. It is within this concept of simplicity that we find the real essence of why people are so magnetically drawn to the ocean.

The hero within this body of work is the component of color. Color plays a large role in my work as a whole, but more particularly within this series as the majority of people who live near a coastline commune at the area’s beaches around the transitional times of dawn and dusk. These are the times of day when the shoreline truly expresses its personality. In order to enhance these qualities I used expired transparency film. Transparency film provides an added element of saturation that negative film cannot and using expired film adds an element of the unpredictable. Expired film can cause small or large color shift depending on many factors including storage conditions, film types and the age of the film.

I chose to use the Holga camera for this project because it adds to the overall narrative and aesthetic of the series. The Holga inherently has a color shift that is exaggerated by the expired transparency film and its low-fi plastic lens. The Holga also has a dreamlike effect that contributes to the series by providing a focal plane that drops out around the edges and a heavy vignette that frames the image.