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Andrea Ellen Reed – Autobiographical
narrative
I have always had the ability to separate
myself from situations and observe the people in my environment.
I would look at them as they finished their conversations
and retreated to different corners of their minds. I would
study their movements and get lost in the subtlety of their
gestures. For sometime I could not figure out why I was
so fascinated with the little nuances of people’s
character that made them unique. It was not until my senior
year at Howard University in Washington DC that I picked
up a camera and seriously investigated this curiosity. I
was two semesters away from receiving my Bachelor’s
in Psychology when I made the decision to become a photographer
and begin to develop my voice as an artist.
This decision gave my life a passion and focus that it had
never had. Only months away from an uncertain future I developed
a portfolio of black and white portraits and got accepted
to the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
In my first semesters here at the Academy
I continued to shoot black and white portraits of people
I met on buses, at church services, and on the street. Although
my skills steadily advanced in street photography I knew
that I wanted to be a fine art photographer with provocative
conceptual works that communicated ideas that I had in my
mind. Ever since studying the psychology of the black
experience at Howard, I have wanted to illustrate a project
that spoke about the misrepresentation of black identity
in America. With that in mind, I shifted my focus to my
goal and began working with large format color photography
in controlled studio spaces. For two years now I have been
working towards this goal of communicating these ideas and
the result of these efforts is my final thesis project:
“Sweet Struggle.”
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