Artist Statement
Caleb Lachelt
The creation of my work is not aimed at a certain audience or problem, and wasn’t created to depict a certain story. Rather, this year’s portfolio attempts to find irony and oddity in the normal world.
I never planned on any certain photo. Instead, I went about my daily life, and when I saw something different or interesting, I focused on it. In my photos I primarily used muted color schemes and dreary looking settings not to bring sadness upon the viewer, but in the hopes of conveying a sense of mental vibrance. Because my photos have no set story, I want viewers to create their own personalized stories with this mental vibrance.
My plan for the theme of this portfolio was to follow the idea of “Ironic Noir,” and I feel that I followed this theme pretty tightly. Each photo has a hint of mystery, as if each subject from the normal world has been transported to a scene from an old detective film. Many of them also contain an element of irony, like a bird wearing a detective hat in the rain, a grinning monkey appearing in the sky behind a family, a mannequin with a cup for a head, or two contrasting pets facing off with each other.
An important aspect of photography to me is the fact that it aims to depict the real world, but show something to viewers that they would not normally see. This differs from other mediums of art like drawing or painting, which are often used to create entirely new worlds or surrealistic abstractions. For this reason, I try only to edit photos with the intention of highlighting what is already there, instead of creating something new from what I originally photographed.
When people look at my portfolio, I simply want them to feel something different than what they normally would. I hope that my photos don’t force a certain feeling on viewers, but allow them to expand their thinking and experience what they want to feel when looking at them. In one sentence, a reviewer of my portfolio might define it as “a mysterious and dark look into the intricacies of everyday irony.”
In the future, I hope to use photography as a helpful tool at hand whenever Ifeel lost or down. It provides for me a way to express myself, and to do so either intensively or casually depending on what my idea calls for. Overall, you should look at these photos as a further exploration into the mind of myself and how I can express it through photography.
Caleb Lachelt
The creation of my work is not aimed at a certain audience or problem, and wasn’t created to depict a certain story. Rather, this year’s portfolio attempts to find irony and oddity in the normal world.
I never planned on any certain photo. Instead, I went about my daily life, and when I saw something different or interesting, I focused on it. In my photos I primarily used muted color schemes and dreary looking settings not to bring sadness upon the viewer, but in the hopes of conveying a sense of mental vibrance. Because my photos have no set story, I want viewers to create their own personalized stories with this mental vibrance.
My plan for the theme of this portfolio was to follow the idea of “Ironic Noir,” and I feel that I followed this theme pretty tightly. Each photo has a hint of mystery, as if each subject from the normal world has been transported to a scene from an old detective film. Many of them also contain an element of irony, like a bird wearing a detective hat in the rain, a grinning monkey appearing in the sky behind a family, a mannequin with a cup for a head, or two contrasting pets facing off with each other.
An important aspect of photography to me is the fact that it aims to depict the real world, but show something to viewers that they would not normally see. This differs from other mediums of art like drawing or painting, which are often used to create entirely new worlds or surrealistic abstractions. For this reason, I try only to edit photos with the intention of highlighting what is already there, instead of creating something new from what I originally photographed.
When people look at my portfolio, I simply want them to feel something different than what they normally would. I hope that my photos don’t force a certain feeling on viewers, but allow them to expand their thinking and experience what they want to feel when looking at them. In one sentence, a reviewer of my portfolio might define it as “a mysterious and dark look into the intricacies of everyday irony.”
In the future, I hope to use photography as a helpful tool at hand whenever Ifeel lost or down. It provides for me a way to express myself, and to do so either intensively or casually depending on what my idea calls for. Overall, you should look at these photos as a further exploration into the mind of myself and how I can express it through photography.