For my project, I decided to explore the idea of movement using the body. I used longboarding as my subject because it is an activity that I really enjoy and also one that involves unique types of movement. When I first learned to ride a longboard, I was surprised by how challenging it was to balance and move in the direction you want. It involves types of movements that do not necessarily come naturally. Longboarding is much harder than it looks when you see someone moving fast by you on the sidewalk. Stopping this motion in photos and looking at the progression as you move reveals a lot about how the body changes position, rather than simply standing still on the board.
This project was also about personal photography because I took images of myself doing something that I enjoy and is important to me. For me, riding a longboard or seeing images of it brings back memories of my first two years of college, when my friends and I would ride together almost every weekend. These images, then, mean having fun and good times with friends to me on a personal level.
How the human body moves when engaged in various activities has been of interest to photographers for a long time. My project was influenced by the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who explored how the body moves. He did this by taking many images of people in rapid succession as they moved. At the time, this was revolutionary work because movies were not yet common, so people had not seen photographic images that involved movement. Using technology that Muybridge did not have at the time, I was able to combine multiple images into one rather than placing them side-by-side as he did in his work. By setting my camera on a tripod and setting it to take pictures continuously, I was able to freeze the movement in each frame. I then superimposed the images in Photoshop to show the progression as one seamless image.
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