INTRODUCING REBECCA WILLIAMS
I come from a very small rural city in North Carolina. I hate living here; if there is an obstacle to my photography it would be my location- there’s just nowhere to go, so I’m left to improvise with a not-very-exciting house. I’m 17, but I like to pretend I don’t have an age. I started taking photos with a Nikon D60 in late 2008. At first it was a passive thing, I didn’t care too much about making them look any particular way, but then I met a girl named Gracie at boarding school and she was such a great model and friend that it fueled my desire to take better photos. So I guess that’s kind of “how” I started to take photos. I remember seeing a lot of photos taken by a few girls my age with regular point and shoot cameras- think MySpace style meets conceptual/surrealistic photography. I thought it was an interesting sort of style and way to express oneself so I decided to see what I could do with a camera myself. There are a lot of things I want to achieve through my photography, from documenting everyday life and random events to trying to capture the minuscule grey area between reality and deception. In some ways I want my photos to express the boundaries of humanity- physically and mentally. Photography is also a release for a lot of the turbulent thoughts I have. As far as goals go, I just want to keep improving and learning, and perhaps learn to print colour photos myself in the darkroom. I don’t particularly want to become “famous” or go to an art school though. There are a lot of things that wouldn’t have happened to me without photography, the more important things being I wouldn’t have met a lot of people that I know now. However, something that would’ve never happened without photography- being recognised in a bookshop by two girls who knew me from my photos! This photo was part of a series of photographs based on a rather macabre dream I had, the dream essentially being me walking through a large forest with many dead schoolgirls upon the ground. It made me think of the death of innocence and so I really wanted to capture it on film. However the series of photos didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to at all, and I hated this particular one for a really long time before I realised that in some ways, it captured what I was trying to express perfectly, but subtly. I absolutely adore my friend Lauren’s photos. What I love about her photography is that she can take a candid photo and it will remain a piece of pure evidence about a moment, but the way it is shot might imply something deeper even if that was not the original intention of the photograph.
becca, you are very inspiring :)
reading this also reminded me that i haven’t taken any photos in a while. that needs to change.
