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.”