For my photo essay, I started to think about the places that I was going to be for the next week. I knew I was going to be in New Orleans traveling the following week to look at wedding venues, so I thought that would be a great place to take photos. However, I was concerned that I wouldn’t have time to do the assignment so I started out with some photographs from home at the local duck pond we have, wanting to do a Hockney inspired spread from there. Of course, the moment I began to do that, Storm Joaquin was headed our way, so every picture that I took was very grey due to the bad weather. So I waited until I took the trip to New Orleans. I have included some of my favorite photos from the research I did that week about Hockney and Picasso. 
These were two quotes in particular that I really liked about Hockney as well:
“He took multiple pictures, concentrating on some areas, and ignoring others. Hockney then selected the photos he wanted to use, placed these onto a board, arranging them by the same decisions of “line and form” that he used when drawing a picture. The end result Hockney called a “Joiner,” a multiple photographic portrait of a place or individual, which gives the viewer a better sense of space and time than any ordinary snapshot.”
“Hockney would have had to bend down to photograph the floor, climb up ladders to photograph the street signs and walk down the highway to photograph the horizon.”
The last photo being a guitar by Picasso which I found similar due to its different view points.
I have also added the next photo to this to show some of what I was looking at for the duck pond collage that I decided in the end not to put up for my assignment, but it was my first try at the Photo Collage. I tried it many different ways and had different pathways leading to other areas but I just wasn’t into it.
I then went to New Orleans and printed a bunch of photos I took from the first day that I arrived there. I finally zeroed in on this one location that I really liked, and started playing around with the different photographs I took from that place.
This was the first version that I created by playing around with zooming in and out of a photo and adding some extension. The final one that I went with is listed below.
I really liked this final version that I went with. I wish I had played more with the side of the photograph and taken more photos. I definitely didn’t see the vision behind this collage until I had sat down with the printed photographs and played around with them. I agree that the other side of the house should have been played with more. I just didn’t have enough time to do it in. I do love how it got me started with thinking about the photo essay and it is now the first photo that you see when you open up the book. I really enjoyed this project and wanted to go back out and do it again a couple of times.
