Dodongo

After 7 years at DA I feel that it is time for me to cut my ties and shove off.

When I arrived at Deviant Art I was driven to create new photographs to put up here, I received instant feedback and critique, something that has long been forgotten about on DA.  This site tipped a few years ago from a website about art to a website about grabbing favorites and page views.  Artist growth here is impossible because of the sheer volume of submissions that took no time, thought, or artistic talent whatsoever to create.  The format of the website has also gotten to the point that I feel I no longer belong here.

I did meet quite a few friends here.  Aaron down south aaronbrownphotography.com/, my talented young friend from South Milwaukee named Ryan scissorxscissor.deviantart.com…, Juha over in Finland patu-.deviantart.com/... You guys have helped me grow and I've enjoyed having a relationship with each of you as a photographer, I believe we've helped each other grow.

I'll be over at a new grass-roots photo site that I'm trying to help grow, I find the site starting out much the same way DA did, I hope it doesn't stray so far from an artist community as DA did. I can be found here : www.fotoblur.com/people/Harris

Thanks to all of my hundreds of watchers, I'm sorry I won't be bringing you any more photography here.

If things ever change here... Which I doubt they will, I'll be back.  Until then, keep your finger on that shutter release and keep making art.

I've been working on my undergrad portfolio project, it is finished and will be displayed here in Milwaukee on May 16th.

I made a website to display the work in a fassion I feel is fitting to the work.  Everything is made by hand, by me.  Take a look!

www.uwm.edu/~tsharris/final

     To start things off, I'd like to thank my good friend and collegue =Jono for buying me a 1 month subscription today.  He's been here on DA for a while, and I've been with him since near the beginning, I was inspiration to him, and he was inspiration to me.  Its important to nutrure the things that motivate you, and to not let them slip away.  The preceding is exactly why I keep a very close relationship here on DA with a few photographers who help keep me going, day after day, shot after shot.


Here is some of Jono's work, our styles often collide.

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     Secondly I'd like to update anyone out there who cares to listen, that I'm getting along well in my photographic education. I'm getting past some of those classes that were.... not up my alley, and into the good ones, with teachers I truly respect. These teachers encourage my creativity and push me further, faster.  I work the best when I can choose projects that I want to do, and then am helped along the way with things to better my work.  As far as the series' I'm working on... There are three, the titles of which are the titles of this jornal.


One I've been working on since October is the Boxcar Series.

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There are about twice as many shots in this series, but thy are not all on DA.

I find a huge amount of beauty and character in these box cars.  They have seen alot more of this country then many of us ever will.  They take tags and other grafiti art and bring them as far as the contents of the boxcar itself.  You find them cutting through the rain, the snow, the rockies and the coastlines.  They push on with no reguard for anything but the saftey of their cargo.  They take hits so the boxes inside them don't have to, they rust, get hit by hail, house the homeless, and more, et they are left sitting in hostile, unguarded environments... just waiting to be set off, coupled to a steal super-mover, thousands of feet long.

The second series I've been working on for the last year or so, its a tribute to the great lakes, and the power they contain.  This series is not restricted to the water and structure in the lakes, it also includes the environments shaped around them.

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This is only a fragment of what I have for this series, but not everything can be funneled to DA,  my gallery would have a thousand deviations.

The last series, and the one I am the most interested in, is my Forgotten Spaces series.  There are places the vast majority of the population walk by every day, and see as eyesores, as places that we would be better off without.  These places were once places of immense productivity, of an american dream.  Inside these places, my camera is able to give them a second life, an afterlife of beauty in dignity, a chance for them to tell their stories for possibly their last time.  These facilities are the blank novel, the leftover structure the binding, each room is a chapter, the halways run through these structures like a river of ink, and whtats left are the words, every record left behind, every old tipped over broken piece pf history has a part in the story.

Over the next few years this stories will unravel through my photography.  Stories that will soon be crushed to gravel, and then buried under a mountain of condos, where new memories will be made, and old ones forgotten forever.

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I'm still excited for photography, the sky's the limit.