mmm, toast

a new prized posession and a call for volunteers

my friend and co-photographer lucy let me photograph her with her bear (whose name happens to be bear) last night as part of the prized possessions project.

over the next couple of months i will need to produce five more images for this series, so if any of you are interested in being photographed with your favorite thing, leave a comment or email me!

here is the first draft of my artist's statement about this series...just in case you were curious about my theories about this.

thought the scriptures warn us to "lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven" (Matt 6:19-20), we all have prized possessions. For many, these objects are not "treasures" in the worldly sense--some may not even be beautiful--but we hold them dear because they tie us to a certain experience, a particular time, place, or person. in essence, it is not the object itself that is most important to us, but what the object represents. the experiences, not the objects, are what make life sweet, and are the only things we will take with us when we leave this world.
in this project, i've sought to catalogue not only prized possessions, but also the stories behind them. this has forced me, as well as my subjects, to think deeply about the objects that are important to us and the reasons we hold them dear.

a shirt

sorry for the lack of updates, i've been off doing this:



with my dear old dad (aka mon petit papa chéri) in maple canyon.

i'm going to be shooting a bunch this week though, so there'll be plenty for you to look at.

contact me, please!

if anyone would like more information regarding pricing/availability, just email me at clairegoussard@yahoo.com and we can talk.

thanks!

katie and the leaves

if you're wondering whether the clothes hanging from this tree mean that i made katie change into the d.i. dress (which we bought on the way to the shoot) in the middle of the aspen grove, you would be right.

i'm really not sure why, but i decided it would be cool to tangle her in the trees with lace...

the end

things to come

firstly,
you know how i was talking about doing a fall illustrative shoot? well, i did, and i think i managed to get some really pretty stuff. i'll try my darndest to post that tomorrow

secondly,
my husband [who stays up to date on all sorts of tech happenings] told me about this black silicon chip they're developing, which could eventually make its way into digital cameras. if it did, it would be 500x more sensitive than current ccd or cmos chips. interesting... i wonder what that would be like. i tend to get freaked out by too much change, but as the president of our church reminded us last weekend in this amazing talk, change is unavoidable and is the mechanism that allows us to progress minute by minute and day by day, hopefully in the right direction.
in any case, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

prized possessions

i've been thinking for a while about doing a series of photographs featuring people's most valuable possessions. i know that it's by no means a new concept, but my anthropological/ethnographic penchant seems to express itself in a kind of need to catalogue people. i just thought it would be really interesting to learn about which physical objects are most meaningful to people and why.

i shot these for a mini-theme in my digital class, but i think it may be an ongoing project.

i started by asking my boss, brad slade, and my co-photo-assistant braden duncan, what their most prized possessions were.
the criteria is this: it has to be a physical object, and it has to be truly important to you, like one of the things you would get if your house were burning.

after much consideration, braden decided that his prized posession(s) were his journals, which he's kept religiously for who knows how long (if only i were that disciplined, my posterity might actually have something to read in 100 years).

brad chose his rolleiflex camera, which he has been using to photograph his beautiful kids since they were babies.

as for me, it's hard to say what i would chose. after rescuing my hard drives with all my photos and my file with old letters and important documents and whatnot, i would probably run back into a burning house for either:

-the silver gilded hand mirror that my mom gave me, which she got from the antique shop that the grandmother of her good friend owned. the grandmother of the good friend was named marika, and is my middle namesake.

-a teacup that my godmother gave me. the story is that when she first moved to montreal from the iowa farm where she grew up, she made a friend. that friend gave her this teacup and saucer, which surprised my godmother because she thought that teacups always had to stay in matching sets. her friend taught her to embrace variety and maybe even discord, and i know that meant alot to her. she gave me the teacup over forty years later, the day her friend died.
my godmother is brilliant.

-the little cloissonne bird that my grandfather bought in india for his dad when he was young. he got it back when his dad died, and gave it to me. it's beautiful. i'll photograph it sometime.




what is your most valued object?

mmm...chocolate

this is what i did for the black on black assignment in my still life class.
this isn't a final version, so hit me with some feedback.

looking back

this post from my fellow photo student ashton reminded me of an engagement shoot i did last fall of my friends katie and parker. the ones with the orange corrugated background were shot in front of the building from ashton's post.

seasons

don't you love the weather this week? now it really feels like fall. i've been dying to go up the canyon and photograph my beautiful friend katie in a grove of birch trees. i want to shoot an illustrative portrait for each of the seasons like mucha's.

meet arvilla

this is my niece arvilla. she is a few weeks old, and i finally got to meet her (and of course photograph her) this weekend. isn't she awesome?

new kicks

i photographed these shoes for my first still life assignment and then decided to keep them (for funsies).
anyway, the assignment was white on white. if nothing else i definitely did a pretty good job at that.