Who does the work of sustaining and maintaining the landscapes that CMU uses to market and present itself? Can we call attention to and celebrate the work that landscape maintenance workers do by documenting and calling attention to the traces of their maintenance work?
I’m interested in finding ways of exploring these questions and would like to use time-lapse, tilt-shift photography to capture this.
*I am a little worried about the time constraint for this project. I wanted to contact CMU maintenance workers (I haven’t been able to intercept any maintenance working on campus yet, but I have reached out to people via email (although no one has responded yet). I contacted Nate Holback, who I understand is head gardener at CMU, but have not heard back yet (I will try to find other ways of contacting people).*
I described my plan to Nate in this way:
Dear Nate,
I hope you’re enjoying the beautiful fall season. I’m Kim, a graduate design student who is also a landscape architect. I have long admired the often-unseen work of the campus landscape maintenance team, and I want to bring more visibility to it through an experimental art project which is part of a class project.
For this class project, I’m using time-lapse, tilt-shift photography to create an almost toy-like, miniature view of the campus landscapes (you can see fun example of those here) My idea for the project is to capture the movements of members of maintenance team—mowing, pruning, mulching, or even watering plants—highlighting the subtle, repetitive work that keeps the campus looking beautiful but often goes unnoticed. No faces would be visible due to the tilt-shift effect and the far away distance of the camera, but I believe it’s important to have the consent of the workers involved, given they’d be the focal point of the scenes.
I’d love your advice on this. Are there particular people or landscapes on campus you think would be ideal for documenting? And would you be able to point me toward the best contacts to start a conversation about consent? I want to ensure that anyone who may be a focal point is comfortable with the project. I will be beginning the project at the end of this week (and may shift plans according to your response).
Thanks for your time! I really appreciate any thoughts or guidance you can offer.
Kind regards,
Kim
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If this doesn’t work, I’m planning to continue my fun microscopy explorations. And might change my subject to a bug in time.
Here’s one capture (I have more to share).
