by Danielle Shi (’19)
Seatbelt
I asked Hoang-ly to pose such that the light would fall in her face, photography being a thing of “light-drawings”. Making the image required getting close up and personal, with the lens directed at her face in close proximity, and took a moment of maneuvering with the camera, which at this stage I was still growing accustomed to.
Trail
Yuqing and Hoang-ly showed up to our hike in Rowland Heights, a Chinese American ethnic enclave of Los Angeles County, wearing matching bucket hats, and I aimed to capture them in a scene with more shade as the sun was high in the sky, making for high contrast. Their slightly out of focus bodies are awash with color, offset by the shimmering bokeh in the trees.
F
lower Girl
Although Yuqing wanted to gaze directly at the camera, I directed her to look downward at the cyanotype she was making so as to preserve a naturalness to the photograph. It’s unclear to the viewer whether the moment is staged or candid, a state of ambiguity I like to preserve within my image-making. The cyanotypes, inspired by Bo Sapphire, turned out beautifully.
Coy
Stephanie is a practiced model and selected her own pose for this image, finding an incongruity in the fence at Schabarum Park in Rowland Heights to accentuate the litheness of her body, and the unlikeliness of its apparent weight depressing the metal. Her face, peeking between the bars of the fence, gestures at female coquetries and the spirit of play.
Float
The image of Hoang-ly walking on air luckily took only one try, but I asked her to leap from the bench several times prior to making the shot so that we could practice her pose in-camera. In her pastel tennis skirt and platforms, she channels a contemporary appeal and a regard for current fashions, with a surreal twist amplified by the sharpness of the picture.
Artist Commentary: SOFT takes from Japanese fashion magazines such as Mina and ViVi to reconstruct the Asian American feminine experience with themes of utopia and dreams. Centering the girlish, the photo set deploys medium-format soft focus portraiture that focuses on positive affect. Warm tonal hues suggest closeness, while images of friendship draw from sentimental family scenes by photographers Rinko Kawauchi and Shin Noguchi. Raising the mundane to the aesthetic, SOFT communicates a necessary return to forms of ordinariness in personal media.
Danielle Shi (’19) is a writer and photographer. Her work can be found at danielleshi.com.