An Exciting New Book ! ! !

"Ridley is 20. Ridley likes taking pictures. Ridley likes it when people are in his pictures, but he also likes it when things that look cool are in them too."

FLICKR ALBUM HERE.

Good afternoon, avid followers. I'm excited to present to you today a book I've designed called Please No Playing in the Fountain that features a series of pictures I took. Much like Robert Frank's Americans, I edited down a lot of pictures of everyday life into a selection of my favorites. I'm interested in taking pictures as a means of chronicling my life including the things and people I encounter. I didn't attempt to find much cohesive meaning or narrative in the pictures unlike Frank, who, according to Sarah Greenough's article¹, "wanted instead to express his opinion of America in his photographs".

"My name is Ridley and I do art and I'm sad about it."

I used an iPhone 6, an Emerson HD Action Cam, and a Sony NEX to take pictures of things and people or people in situations that caught my attention. Using a variety of cameras ranging from 'unprofessional' to 'professional' (whatever those words mean) as well as the *awesome* high-contrasting effects of flash, I was able to produce aesthetically different images (see the difference between "church" and "noah". The process wasn't much of a process, really, in that I let my instincts decide when and of what I would take a picture, relying on a funny situation or a particularly poetic situation. So, in that sense I suppose, I did offer some meaning within individual pictures, especially with the five "biodegradable" images of beer bottles and cans left on the ground.

DON'T BUY IT.


¹ Quote taken from Sarah Greenough's article, "Transforming Destiny into Awareness: The Americans."