Assignment 3: Borrowed Photos

I have always been interested in the concept of home. For many people, when you say the word home they immediately think of one place in particular. For me when I hear the word home I just think of all the houses that I have lived in while moving from place to place. This is why I chose to take google maps photos of all the houses or apartment buildings that my family has lived in or owned. This is the first picture of my “Home” series because it makes my overall theme of the series obvious right off the bat. For this picture I arranged the houses in order of when I lived in them. Each photo then has a amount of time that was spent in each place and it is right in the middle of the photo. By just taking a snapshot of each map and adding the text to the I feel as though I have transformed them to have meaning instead of just being google images of houses.

My second image of the sequence gets a little bit more conceptual about different types of homes. I combined an image of a slum with an image of a nice small home and connected them via their doors. I did not do this image to say one is better that the other I did it more to show the contrast of different types of homes. These images were cropped and adjusted in order for them to fit together better.
The third Image of the sequence gets even more conceptual because it shows a contrast between sleeping at home and sleeping homelessly. I connected these photos by connecting he torso of a person sleeping on the street to the torso of someone sleeping at home. These images have changed from being just pictures of people sleeping in their beds and on the street to a contrast photo showing the big problem with the growing homeless community. I think it is very important to think about the homeless population when talking about “home”. I always wonder how some people got to be living on the streets. Did they have a place called home? Have they made the streets their home? 

The Fourth and Final image of this sequence gets back to the broader idea of home. I took photos of different types of homes that fill one city block. This photo includes suburbs, slums, an RV park, a farm/ranch , a city, and a mansion with property. These photos separately have different meanings but when they come together they all represent different ways to fill one block with homes or a home. I made this image in black in white so that all the images would flow together better. I also didn’t want people looking at it to be distracted by the colors and not think about the concept.