Steven Russell: Final Project

This body of work is a composition of my life in that they are things that I struggle with on a daily basis.  The things are what my photography centers on despite me being in some of the images.  They are spiritual principles or sins that I think about constantly.  They comprise a huge part of my life that I struggle with.  There are six images of different ideas both good and bad that speak towards the religious beliefs that I have.  I chose images that show what goes on in my mind in terms of importance.  These ideas are important to me because they are intertwined with my faith.  The images show me, in various ways, through my struggle to understand and wrestle with them.  I chose to depict the ideas of: guilt, lust, vanity, pride, redemption, and heaven.  I wanted the images to be very personal and visceral while maintaining the idealistic principles that I have just expressed.  The reasoning for why I chose this topic is in short my faith.  I have prayerfully considered many different ideas that I could express.  I decided that nothing would better show me than that which I feel important to how I live my life.  The ideas that are in these photographs are a big part of my life.  They have impact on my mentality, how I treat people, and even how I treat myself.  My faith plays a role in how I live my life.  This being said the way I live my life is either in line with that faith or falls into another less admirable category.  These images describe both my less admirable points as well as the awesome clarification and realization of what my faith promotes.  This project is a self-examining portrayal of myself but is something that every human deals with.  I wanted to include the teachings of my faith along with the images themselves so as to show exactly what it is that makes me feel that these topics are relevant to my life and not just menial facts of life. They are things that I can change and not just accept.  I shot this project in my house because I it to be very personal and within my living space.  These pictures are portraiture in a way because they show my struggles and even have myself in most of the images.  The pictures are not of just myself but of things as well.  For instance there is a still-life photograph incorporated as well in the set.  I wanted the viewer to get up close to me in a physical sense to show how close these things are to my heart.