“Three Weeks”

Finished up my final studio project today. Hung 100 photos on the wall in a Wolfgang Tillman order. My thumbs hurt from the 400 odd pins I stuck to hold them. My final exhibition was decided on because I wanted to take something from my real life. My travel and experience from my time spent abroad. My life is my work. So with that in mind I used my time in the south island as a base. Thus named “Three Weeks.”
Here’s my artist statement for a better understanding of the work, along with a few photos I’ll add to the end of this entry…
I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas and at the age of twenty-one I decided to leave the country and move to New Zealand for six months. A much-needed holiday on an island most people don’t even know exists. Or even if they actually have heard, they think it is located in Europe and not the southern hemisphere where it presides.
It was due time for me to leave the nest and go out to embark on my own travels. Six months was a good length.
I’ll be honest, the homesickness never caught on. Maybe a smidge, but it was never enough to be calling home crying and saying I’ll be catching the next flight back to Kansas. I loved it here. There was no question about it. New Zealand was everything I ever wanted compacted into one little place and uncorrupted by the rest of the world. It was simply choice.
I’d always wanted to travel abroad. For once, experience what I’d grown up reading about in books. The pictures of other cultures, the landscapes of foreign lands are what deeply intrigued me. Studying the likes of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Martin Parr, Richard Misrach, William Eggleston, and Wim Wenders. I had grown intensely, and was overflowing with an urge to go out and discover what a foreign place could offer me. Looking with new eyes and insight, and to tell a story as a girl from Kansas could only tell.
I wanted to immerse myself in photography through travel and retain that intimate connection. So with school holiday in the midst three friends and I rented a van and ventured down to the south island of New Zealand, for what would be the road trip of a lifetime. Three weeks trapped in a van and bringing new meaning to a vagabonding experience.
Wellington, my first ever ferry boat right, Able Tasman National Park, the glorious western coast, Fox Glacier, mountainous Queenstown, etc. It was all just words in our travel guide. And with each passing day we began to really unearth what this heavenly place had to offer. We beyond doubt felt like children at Christmas with the big eyes and the surprises that lay under the tree.
Keeping a journal of every passing day. Photographing to the extent of filling up my friends hard drive, I realized that no picture or video could ever do true justice to what New Zealand appeared. It was then that I wanted to really step out of the realm of typical travel and really try and focus on my three weeks at hand. From the words of Max Pam my photographs aid memoir for a moment shared on the road. For each photograph is shaped by incidents experienced as a traveler, a record of an experience, and a personal account of an encounter somewhere in the world. My three weeks is not simply a photograph of a past but exists for each viewer as an experience in the present.