Artist Lecture

Listening to Stephanie Robbins approach to photography and installations captivated me. I became mostly inspired by the development of her theme and the dimension it held. Her personal experiences with her family, inspirations of artists and development of her own work gracefully pulled itself together to the works she displays today.

Stephanie uses her photographic installations to study human behavior both in an internal and external approach. Figure one shows an example of Stephanie’s installations, one that does not involve the element of photography but the element of sound recordings. As two people enter this room and game of chess they are pushed in to this world and history of Stephanie and her father playing chess. The recordings switch between a recording of her childhood and adulthood. Caught between sentimental, sad, nostalgic and intrusive, the mind of the audience/actors forced them to choose between immersing themselves either in the game of chess of the narrative played in the headset. 

 Stephanie’s lecture and works inspired me to push the limits and think deeper on the manner in which my photos are displayed. She taught a valuable lesson that photos do not need to be simply looked at but can be touched, played with, stolen, and in some senses listened to.  I struggled with some of her concepts in that at times I felt they fell away from art and became too dependent on this idea of purely behavioral observations. With my own work I would strive to find more of a balance, which leaned toward the beauty of a picture.

I look forward to someday participating in one of Stephanie’s work and using her lessons in the development of my own. 

figure 1