Today I attended a lecture for Hank Willis Thomas. I must say that I enjoyed his work a lot. In his series Pitch Blackness he was dealing with the loss from his cousin being murdered. He learned to be himself without his shadow. The next series that he showed us was Sometimes I See Myself in You. It was three images on a black background. One of him, one of his mother, and one where he had photoshopped their faces together. While viewing a lot of his images you start to see that family is very important to him.
My favorite series that he showed was when he figured out that he tended to use a lot of frames throughout his images. The ones where he had people posing with the frames in a studio setting were not that interesting. However, the ones where he gets volunteers to hold the frame over something else. The one that caught my eye the most was the one where two people were holding the frame between them and it caught another couple in the frame. That wasn’t the interesting part though. The best part was the people off to the side that are more interested in what was going on with the photographer and the models then with the other people in their own group.
The other project of Thomas’s that I really enjoyed was his series Along the Way. His friend mentioned to him that a lot of Thomas’s work was a bit depressing because he was still trying to deal with his cousin’s death. So he decided to make a project where he had people stand in front of the camera for 30 seconds and they can do whatever they want. I absolutely fell in love with this project! As a whole it is intriguing and when you see the videos up-close they are hilarious. A lot of the people danced around or did other things which being recorded but there was also some that just stood there awkwardly. I appreciate that he didn’t exclude these videos.
“Always consider meaning when it comes to photography. So much interaction in a split second.” -Hank Willis Thomas
Website
http://hankwillisthomas.com/splash.html
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