Maudlin Exit

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When I started taking photos for Maudlin Exit, I wasn’t thinking about the end of my college career or artificial intelligence. I was primarily concerned with learning more about strobe lights and honing my studio portrait skills. As I continued my education and neared the end of my undergraduate education, I enrolled in an advanced digital photography course that introduced me to new editing techniques. I also started to think about the changes that are looming in the distance, which include leaving many of the people and places I know. I started playing around with photoshopping my photos and eventually moved into work with artificial intelligence. 

Due in part to my personal fears about forgetting what people look like, I began photographing the people close to me. Using artificial intelligence, I then selected features and deleted them, letting the computer fill the empty spaces with what it thinks should be there. I learned to distort faces, eradicate features and create patterns, converting the originally relatively simple (though dramatically lit) portraits into something distinctly less representational. Maudlin Exit serves as a personal means of detachment through destruction, as we all change and distort, allowing me to visualize my fears of letting go, letting the good moments and good friends pass and change as life continues.

As I leave college and my current home in La Crosse, I recognize that those who I’ve met in the past five years, including those I’ve met this final semester, won’t stay the same. The entirety of them is going to change and these portraits, both the original source images and the altered versions, serve as a way for me to both document and destroy my concepts of these people. In a way I am letting go of what I think these people are on the surface and preparing myself for their evolution, and at the same time preparing myself for the future.