photographer essay

For this six weeks, the photographer that I mainly felt inspired by was Lola Dement Myers. This is mainly due to the fact that I even created an assignment based off a series of her work. I really like the way she views subjects in such a unique and interesting perspective, as well as how she plays with colors. In addition, I find her scanography work really fascinating and I hope to play around with that in the future. Most of all, I was really captivated by the fact that she incorporates a little square or circle of a photo within the main photo in a lot of her work, so I wanted to try that out with my own photos.

Myers is currently 19 years old and attends School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Aside from photography, she creates illustrations and ceramics. A lot of her work alludes to the Nike corporation, and she often uses the symbol and the title of the brand in her art. I originally wasn’t sure what her reason was for doing this, but she made a post on Instagram where she said she’s merely pretending to market for the brand. In a sense, she’s sort of rebranded the company and used it to create her artistic identity, which I find pretty neat. I didn’t really understand it at first, but now I do because it helps to show her design skills and it could potentially score her a job at a shoe or fashion company. Aside from the nike symbol, Myers also uses a little flower symbol in her work to further create her brand and identity. I find it really interesting because it allows people to automatically know that she created those pieces without having to see her name. She has created several unique products, such as “nike breakfast bowls” and “nike quilts” and nike underwear.

Overall, I find Myers to be really innovative and unique. She’s not following everybody else’s trends. She’s not trying to be every other Petra Collins wannabe by throwing glitter and pink fairy lights in all of her photos. I think it’s really cool that she makes stuff that’s out of the ordinary. She inspires me to create my own original artistic presence and to not just copy every other trendy photographer out there at the moment. I really respect the way she puts herself out there, takes risks, and experiments with a lot of different mediums. I’m really inspired by her individuality and creativity, and I hope one day I’ll be able to reach that. It’s women like her that inspire me to create boldly.