Jia Chen Professor Karlic Vis167 Term Project Artist Statement June 8, 2016 A Life· Alive Photography has become my passion in artistic expression since two years ago when I first touched a film camera. Observing, exploring, and analyzing society has also been another daily activity I like doing for at least a moment. When these two obsessions of mine started integrating simultaneously, I started to improve myself, identify myself, and find multiple facets of myself through this process. I used to make photograph about some “decisive moment” from urbanity and from my daily life to call the audience attention on the tiny moment one would typically not take a few seconds to think about. In the other words, I use photography as my words to describe how the world looks like from my perspective. My term project of social engagement is a work on a sequence of “California life” through my personal perspective based on my exploration of how California is for me and for the local people. During the process of this project, I have gained a clearer idea on what California looks like, what is the California dream for the local people. These processes have also transformed my personal California dream. I titled my series of these photographs simply “A Life · Alive ”, which simply means the demonstration of how life in California is conscious and alive. However, my photography series is diversiform. To be specific, I decided using landscape, typical mundane or symbolic objects, representative human figures, and the abstract or detail on partial description to present what my understanding of “California life” is and how my understanding changes. My photography work is always a way for me to express how I feel and what I see. Therefore, every single photograph in this project is directly from my personal view and is the documentary on the subject matter I chose. As for the non-human figures photography, I am mainly focusing on using different composition to frame them to speak out on what I think and how I feel. Additionally, the different times of day (day time or night time) to shoot the subject, and the tone of the entire imagery is the way I express my subjective view on my project. Also, I always focus on making my photography to bring my audience a different new way to see and ponder about what they used to see. In order to achieve this result, I focused on subject matter choice, creative composition, and lighting of every frame. Furthermore, I put my whole sequence in a specific order on two different levels. Firstly, I ordered my project in a geographic order from the west coastline to inland California based on the locations of the photographs. Then I ordered the sequence based on the photographs’ diurnal variation. The geographic order of the photographs present how I changed my personal view, feeling, and my dream of California, but the diurnal variation is to diversify the project itself. As .