Nathaniel Smith BFA Photography Thesis Fall 2015
Stargazing from a Studio Apartment
This is a series of photographs about the sublime experience of encountering infinity. I’m driven by the feeling of being really small in an endless universe. In an attempt to conjure the sublime I’m using photography to magnify the everyday things in my living space into vast landscapes. The sublime is a human response that takes place in the mind. From a place of solitude in my studio apartment I’m thinking about the way that technology and the construct of urban life creates a fictional separation from people and the natural world. In an increasingly virtual world, with computers in our pockets and nature as other, I’m creating virtual landscapes. I’m interested in dramatizing and illuminating the ways that we have already turned the natural world into a strange virtual space.