Jason Ross
Kendall College of Art and Design

My Lives (Imagined): Narrative Self-Portraits

Biography: Jason will be a December 2004 graduate of Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is an Illustration major with minors in both Visual Communications and Photography. By having these tools at his disposal, Jason hopes to remain creatively versatile. He enjoys telling stories visually, but feels that his ideas are too broad to limit to only one outlet. Illustrators, graphic designers, writers, filmmakers, and photographers are all storytellers, and he aspires to flow confidently within and between each of these fields.

Objective: The photographs in My Lives (Imagined) are digital self-portraits staged and lit to convey a "cinematic" feeling and suggest narrative story lines. As a photographer and illustrator, I enjoy creating artwork that tells (or at least hints at) stories that extend beyond the actual image. Though I like my work to be thought-provoking, I never want it to be weighed down with some sort of social statement. I create my images with the main purpose of entertaining — like still versions of a Hitchcock film, Twilight Zone episode, or Dahl short story (which are all influences on the themes and mood of my work). By using myself as the only "model" in the series, I attempt to create convincing interaction between two (or more) versions of myself in situations that never actually existed. The believability of these false interactions and my attention to lighting to create mood are what I feel make my work successful.

Tools used: I used Adobe® Photoshop® as my "digital darkroom" — adjusting color and brightness, etc. The Layers option was also crucial in the merging of my digital "double exposures." Adobe Illustrator® was used to create the cover, catalog, photo sleeve, and Zip disk cover of my project packaging.