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Abstract

The Pioneers of photography sought to document their lives with a new sense of reality and permanence. The results have persevered throughout photography's brief history as sparse, elegant, honest and strikingly beautiful images. My research uses late nineteenth century and early twentieth century equipment and techniques to document the timeless beauty, which connects us to those old photographs by creating portraits of people, which will deceive and nurture memory. Without our memories, we respond to the present with only survival instincts. Memory is our pool of reference for all experience. Only two basic elements, light and memory, are used as the primary tools in this study. The medium through which these elements are being studied is the only medium in the creative arts in which light is the mark maker: photography. The vivid sharpness found in large format photographs creates a lush and surreal portrayal of time and reality that lends beauty to the nature of this study itself: the perceptions and myths we hold dear to our hearts and minds. The images created for this study portray the vivid lights of both day and night and the illuminated bodies of our species in a suspended dream-like state. They are pictures of people existing in beautiful worlds, which now act as our tangible and visible memory. These photographs, which are to be exhibited at the University of Arkansas in the 2001-2002 academic year, are a portrayal of modem people in a setting and style that erases all traces of date or origin

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