Dan Kelly - Photo Research Project

            The photographer, Connie Samaras, was born in the year 1950 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She loved the arts as a kid, but she grew up in a small town with not much culture and love for the arts. Connie was also the first person in her family to go to college, where she could finally meet people who had passions for photography and videography. She received her M.F.A. degree at the Eastern Michigan University. She began her career in both photography and videography the 1980’s and has been doing it ever since. She still does photography and videography, however she also is a professor at the University of California, Irvine where she teaches Photography, Intermedia, and Cultural Criticism.

            Connie has many different types of photographs that she creates. She focuses on “feminism, culture, technology, sexuality and gender studies, science, and both man-made and natural environments.” (wikipedia.org) She creates photographs because she wants people to think about parts of pop culture that are taken for granted or not noticed. She wants to show a real scene but make it look somewhat unreal. She does this through the color and lighting in her photographs. She also likes to capture photographs to paint a picture about the places culture. Connie has traveled all around the world to find places to photograph like Dubai, a scientific outpost in Antarctica at the South Pole, ground zero in New York City just a few days after 9/11, and the first private spaceport in the deserts of New Mexico.

                                        

            This photograph I found in the book called Tales of Tomorrow, by Connie Samaras. The photograph I chose is one of two photos created in 2009 called Workers Checking Fountain Nozzles. The subject matter is the men doing labor, and the form is the water and the men. The content in the photo is all of the construction work and labor going on within the photograph. This work represents what life is really like in Dubai. Two thirds of Dubai is working class people who have barely any legal rights. They have very little healthy care, no social security, and they could possibly be expelled from the United Arab Emirates at all times. In the book, it states that the “two versions of Workers Checking Fountain Nozzles encapsulate the floating quality of the Emirati empire, where everything is owned by supra-government agencies tied to the ruling oligarchy.” (Tales of Tomorrow pg. 23) Samaras intentions were to create a photograph that could show how Dubai is trying to turn their city into a place full of beauty and amusement with the bright blue water and big buildings, but really it is a city full of suffering and labor for 2/3 of their people with all of the construction in the background and men doing labor close up. She communicates this idea to the audience by making sure she gets the beautiful, bright blue water in the photograph, but also making sure to get the men doing labor and the amount of construction going on in the background. Most of Connie's photographs always seem to have a deeper meaning to them that can be hard to see, but after I did some research, I learned this photographs real meaning and many more of her other photographs deeper meanings.