Iris Rising: Processing in the Lab

This is Jennifer Kay's first entry to her photo diary.

Visual Diary by Jennifer Kay
 
“Photography is part history, part magic." 
 Photojournalist Seamus Murphy, VII

Entry 1 - Monday, April 3, 2012

Seamus Murphy is one of a dozen or so photojournalism bylines that sticks with me, because his photographs stick with me. I read somewhere that the Irish-born Murphy got his start in photojournalism relatively late, in his late 20s. Part of why I remembered his name was because I liked that he wasn’t a prodigy, that he was someone who put in the work, and that it wasn’t too late to start making visual stories.

Murphy has won at least half a dozen World Press Photo Awards for his work from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. He’s recently begun exploring film making -- his photography from Afghanistan, “A Darkness Visible,” is being extended into a film, and he recently shot 12 short videos to accompany PJ Harvey’s album “Let England Shake.”                                                                                                     

 There are elements of Murphy’s work that I hope to emulate this semester with the IPC Visual Lab:

               • isolating figures with the frame
               • vanishing points
               • silhouettes and repeated forms
               • creating opportunities out of restrictions  
                  (for example, using photo bombing to isolate figures)

Jennifer Kay is partaking on a visual journey and this semester she will share pages from her
photo journal. Here are several images from upcoming entry.

On April 1, 2012 several thousands of Trayvon Martin supporters gathered at Bayfront Park in Miami to lend their voices to the outcry for justice regarding the slain Miami-Dade student who was killed during a brief visit to Sanford, Florida.  Jennifer Kay documented some of the participants of the rally with the new acquired awareness of her visual mentor Seamus Murphy.