Levy
November 2011
I live in a pretty unique place; a rural town that is only 30 minutes from Minneapolis/St Paul. The town hall, situated amongst the acreage, is housed in a little one-room schoolhouse. One would think, in this quaint little town that local politics are as quiet as the wind brushing over the fields of alfalfa, however that’s not the case.
Two perceived forces lurk in the air of Grant, Minnesota; one wants to keep lot sizes at 10 acres with dirt roads, the other wants to split their land for profit and pave roads so they don’t have to keep paying for car repairs.
A decade of turbulent times resulted in lawless actions by some. Council members have found nails scattered in their driveways and civil and criminal suites have been filed based on election practices.
The abrupt changes in our little town, including two mayors and a clerk unexpectedly leaving, have been in both local and city newspapers. I believe this turbulence is due to the preciousness of the heritage some are fighting so diligently to protect. Townspeople who revel in the homestead way of life live on dirt roads. They welcome the lack of development, no sidewalks, no hydrants, with the understanding that if there is a fire, there will probably be nothing left.
Through my photography my goal was to capture a sense of community through participation, while documenting controlled and spontaneous emotion. Emotions that I have identified in the images are restraint, anticipation, aggression, patients, and friendliness. These emotions are similar to the emotions conveyed in Paul Shambroom's Meetings series (http://www.paulshambroom.com/art/meetings%20revA/index.html), from which I drew inspiration.
At the Council’s special meeting held on September 17, 2011, I shot images in the RAW format, which were then processed in Camera Raw for exposure, contrast, and color correction, then opened in Photoshop for further processing including cropping and sizing.
To emulate the simplistic lifestyle of Grant, Minnesota I chose to reduce the colors of the images to a deep brown. I first used the Photoshop plug-in Silver Efex Pro 2 by Nik Software and created higher contrast, black and white images with a strong structure, which were then converted to monotone using a very dark brown for
the color.
After viewing the images I felt they had a journalistic quality and proceeded to process each one with the halftone filter to mimic a newspaper halftone. To get a high-resolution dot I first had to upsample the images doubling the resolution. After the increase in resolution, I then applied the color halftone, with which I choose a 45° angle. This angle is typically used for one-color halftone images in newsprint. All of the highlights and shadows were carefully checked making sure the minimum or maximum dot was acceptable.
When I first viewed the magnified dots that I had created in the image I realized the formation of the image was created by a community of dots; similar to my community — some powerful, some small and meek but each one comes together to create the image.
Two perceived forces lurk in the air of Grant, Minnesota; one wants to keep lot sizes at 10 acres with dirt roads, the other wants to split their land for profit and pave roads so they don’t have to keep paying for car repairs.
A decade of turbulent times resulted in lawless actions by some. Council members have found nails scattered in their driveways and civil and criminal suites have been filed based on election practices.
The abrupt changes in our little town, including two mayors and a clerk unexpectedly leaving, have been in both local and city newspapers. I believe this turbulence is due to the preciousness of the heritage some are fighting so diligently to protect. Townspeople who revel in the homestead way of life live on dirt roads. They welcome the lack of development, no sidewalks, no hydrants, with the understanding that if there is a fire, there will probably be nothing left.
Through my photography my goal was to capture a sense of community through participation, while documenting controlled and spontaneous emotion. Emotions that I have identified in the images are restraint, anticipation, aggression, patients, and friendliness. These emotions are similar to the emotions conveyed in Paul Shambroom's Meetings series (http://www.paulshambroom.com/art/meetings%20revA/index.html), from which I drew inspiration.
At the Council’s special meeting held on September 17, 2011, I shot images in the RAW format, which were then processed in Camera Raw for exposure, contrast, and color correction, then opened in Photoshop for further processing including cropping and sizing.
To emulate the simplistic lifestyle of Grant, Minnesota I chose to reduce the colors of the images to a deep brown. I first used the Photoshop plug-in Silver Efex Pro 2 by Nik Software and created higher contrast, black and white images with a strong structure, which were then converted to monotone using a very dark brown for
the color.
After viewing the images I felt they had a journalistic quality and proceeded to process each one with the halftone filter to mimic a newspaper halftone. To get a high-resolution dot I first had to upsample the images doubling the resolution. After the increase in resolution, I then applied the color halftone, with which I choose a 45° angle. This angle is typically used for one-color halftone images in newsprint. All of the highlights and shadows were carefully checked making sure the minimum or maximum dot was acceptable.
When I first viewed the magnified dots that I had created in the image I realized the formation of the image was created by a community of dots; similar to my community — some powerful, some small and meek but each one comes together to create the image.
