This is the first photo I've taken for this class. It is a recreation of Imogen Cunningham's 1929 photo entitled Two Callus, a Gelatin silver print. My recreation uses socks.

To create this photo, I chose to keep similar composition, with a lighter subject surrounded by a more starkly contrasting, dark frame. The image is close up, and, since Cunningham emphasized and was drawn to texture in nature, I similarly chose to let the light fall where it may upon the socks, creating the areas of dark and light. I attempted to keep the image as balanced as the original, with roughly equal areas of dark and light, since there is so much contrast in the original; yet, due to the nature of the socks, less light reflected, and the image is still a tad darker than its inspiration.

Cunningham was fascinated by texture and patterns in nature--she looked to her surroundings and found beauty in the play of light off of the smallest of details. Given her background in chemistry and science, her photos seem to have an analytical quality in their clarity, and a great degree of realism--beauty as found not in the romantic notions and staged portrayals of her time, but in the reality of her surroundings. There is nothing more natural, more everyday to me than piles of laundry on my floor, so I strove to record a piece of my own reality through the manipulation of light across such a pile, this small detail of my own reality, examined and exposed.