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Kaitlyn Levesque

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Kaitlyn Levesque

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……….Venus is not just the Roman goddess of love; it is also the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s Ultimate Frisbee team, of which I happen to be a member. The team is comprised of wonderful and wacky women who somehow seem to mesh perfectly and have more than willingly accepted me into their makeshift family. It is for these reasons that I chose to photograph the Venus team in all of their glory.

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Kaitlyn Levesque

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Kaitlyn Levesque

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These photographs also extend beyond the simple subject of the Venus team and fits into a category that I have much love for but really was only able to explore with this last assignment. It is my personal project of candid portraiture. There is something so fulfilling about capturing the essence of a person in a single frame. It is challenging and frustration at times, but ultimately so incredibly beautiful. While this specific group of candid portraits is meant to showcase my fellow teammates it is also meant to further explore off my established style of photography. I wanted these photographs to be crisp, and saturated, and strong; I wanted them to capture reality, but also retain elements of surrealism. These photographs are meant to embody the essence of Venus, aggressive but playful, committed to the game and each other.

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Kaitlyn Levesque

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Venus is something that is very important to me, so I thought it only fitting to conclude my term and portfolio with my interpretation of and homage for my team and the sport that brought us together.

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Kaitlyn Levesque

Copyright 2012

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About The Author: Kaitlyn Levesque is a sophomore enrolled in the College of the University of Pennsylvania. Class of 2014 – Copyright 2012

Silf-Portrait 2011

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Tony Ward

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……….I would like to thank all of the contributors, friends and colleagues who have supported TWS over the course of an extraordinary year of growth. You have made this a very special year for the audience that follows TWS. Your contributions have been most inspiring. I look forward to the coming year with great enthusiasm, anticipation, and the expectation that our audience will continue to grow and expand – well in to the new year and years to come.

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I would like to especially thank my colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania for providing an exceptional venue to share information, and most importantly, the students who have taught me the joy and importance of teaching. Happy New Year!

Renata Siruckova

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Renata Siruckova

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……….For women, clothing has always had a strong connection to fashion and the desire to look stunningly beautiful in an outfit. However, I have found that men look for something a little different when it comes to how they dress. They look for a simple outfit that will provide fit and comfort, while being extremely versatile and durable. In a recent photo shoot, I wanted to explore this idea. I took casual, everyday outfits for men, and portrayed them in a way that would show they would conform to whatever lifestyle the man wearing the outfit has. The styles are tested to the extreme through the movements of jumping, flipping, running, etc. I also wanted to give a sense of power to men when they see the images – perhaps making them think something along the lines of “If I wear these kinds of clothes, I could do a flip off of those stairs too!”

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Renata Siruckova

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Renata Siruckova

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Renata Siruckova

About The Author: Renata Siruckova is enrolled in the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. Class of 2014.

www.TonyWardStudio.com

Posted on August 26, 2011

Cyclist And A Car

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Scott Roslyn

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……….As the weather improves along the Eastern seaboard, not only shorts, sundresses and flip-flops are being seen out on the streets on a sunny afternoon. Folks are back on their bikes too. When commuting from Philadelphia, a bike is oftentimes a more efficient –and certainly more enjoyable – ride than your average SEPTA bus. Even on a day when the weather was not so nice, however, this writer saw many cyclists pushing their pedals across the Schuylkill River on their way to class or work. What is this sub-culture all about? A different breed of folks, driven by different motives, I sought to delve deeper into this biker (or rather is it cyclist) world.

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The first incarnation of the bicycle was developed by Baron von Drais in 1817 and was known as the walking machine since one actually walked alongside it rather ride it. In 1865, an improved version was known as the velocipede, or more commonly the boneshaker, a reflection of the still less than ideal ride the early bicycle offered. We have clearly come a long way.

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Pushing Walnut Bridge

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The bike is back. We are seeing its resurgence in daily culture across the country. Urban planners and architects in Portland, Oregon are re-imagining the city with a vision of bikers having a more equitable share of the roadways with cars and buses. In New York City, the young and blossoming New York High Line has become an incredible thoroughfare for walkers and bikers along the previously tough-to-access West Side of Manhattan. Across many corporate campuses, shared bicycles dot the entrances of many office buildings and sidewalks, offering an easy connection from meeting to meeting.

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A recent ideation project launched by San Francisco-based innovation consultancy IDEO imagines the modern day bicycle as an environmentally conscious vehicle as well as energy generator. The turning of the gears charges a portable battery affixed on the handlebars, which can then be unplugged and used to charge smart phones, portable music devices, laptops and other technological gadgets.

About The Author: Scott Roslyn is an MBA Graduate, Class of 2011, The Wharton School – University of Pennsylvania

Balance

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Scott Roslyn

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I like the idea that a photograph should reveal a perspective you’ve never seen before. A photo is nothing if you look at it and know that you’ve seen the shot before. This sense of creation, exploration, and moving things to a new place, a higher place, is what I love most about photography.

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What I also like about photography though is that it’s not about what that observer of the photograph might feel. It’s really about what the photographer himself is feeling as he captures that image.

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I create art because of this opportunity to see something new in my surroundings and in myself. It helps that I love it and that I can completely and utterly get lost in it.

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In this shoot with a rock climber at a nearby indoor climbing wall, I was interested in the study of the subject and his environment but I was also drawn to it because of the metaphor that I was wrestling with in my own mind about the walls we encounter in life, and the walls we build within ourselves.

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I enjoy studying what happens within the human psyche and the human spirit when we come upon one of these barriers. We all have a choice. We can either embrace that challenge and rise to it, or we can crumble under its weight and allow that challenge to crush us.

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Leap

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One of the things that I have learned over the last few years is that we are the ones who oftentimes build these walls for ourselves. Not always. Sometimes life is like that. No doubt. But other times we are own worst enemy.

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For example, over the course of our lives, we have constructed facades to allow us to be successful. We know the questions to things to say in an interview, the questions to ask at a dinner party, the right jokes to tell, to always put our best foot forward. Many of us had not experienced failure in our lives. The fear of uncertainty, the fear of failure, of not being perfect, and of what it feels like to not be superhuman, to not be invincible. We want to think of ourselves in this light, as indestructible, and oftentimes that’s how others have begun to see us too, and that’s what we want.

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But in the end, we are building walls that prevent us from seeing the real me. This is self-limiting. We are not at our greatest with these limits and these walls in place. We are awesome and we are extraordinary, but we must face these walls, and climb these walls to realize our true potential.

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Through the metaphorical medium of a climbing wall, a climber I had just met, and a 35mm camera loaded with TMax 400 film, I sought to document the walls that we climb, the walls that we build, and the walls that we overcome.

Trust

About The Author: Scott Roslyn is an MBA Candidate, Class of 2011, The Wharton School – University of Pennsylvania.

Self-Portrait With Calusses

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Jamie Napoli

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………As a member of the University of Pennsylvania’s lightweight rowing program who walked on to the team in my freshman year without any prior rowing experience, I have experienced both the sentiments and perceptions of an outsider to this community, apprehending and judging it from afar, and also those of an integral member of the team, deeply immersed in its social skein. One aspect of the rowing identity that strikes me as peculiar is the apparent disparity between the work required to excel in this sport and the gratification it requites. While I spend approximately the same amount, if not more of my time rowing each day than I do in class, and while I have come to regard my practice times as the strenuous portions of my days, with class and class work serving as a relatively comfortable respite from rowing, the actual remuneration offered me by academic success far outweighs that offered by rowing. When I finish school here in a little over a year, I will graduate from the University, not the rowing program. My diploma will list my majors, not my extracurricular. The skills that I learn in my classes each day will propel me forward to excel in graduate school and in my future career, whereas my proficiency as a rower will be quickly forgotten. While there is no doubt in my mind that I love rowing and I would not exchange for all the “A’s” Penn has to offer my experiences on this team, the friends I have made, the intense moments of glory, and the constant presence of satisfaction at my ability to persevere, I cannot help but lament the ephemeral nature of this pleasure, and the sadness its lack will produce once it has passed.
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Rowers' Hands

One of the most salient signifiers of a rower is the physical damage inflicted on his hands. I am recognized as a rower more often by the wounds and calluses covering my palms and fingers than by any other facet of my appearance. For some of my teammates, this recognition serves as a source of pride, and thus they wear their beaten hands as badges of their abilities to endure. For others, their hands represent weakness, softness of skin, and they seek to conceal them or punish them further by not taking care of their wounds. Still others feel contempt for their tortured hands only when they are outside of the rowing environment, and fear that this signifier of their physical toughness will be misconstrued as frailty or indicative of some sort of sickness.

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Rowers' Hands

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My goal in this assignment is to convey a broad spectrum of rowers’ sentiments towards their hands, these ambiguous signifiers, these paltry vessels of recognition for such an unappreciated community. I have approached the actualization of this concept as a sequence of double portraits. Each print will contain both a portrait of the subject with his hands on display and a close up shot of his hands gripping an oar handle. The relationship between the subject and his hands will be demonstrated not only through each of the two images individually, but also in the various formal methods I will use to juxtapose the images.

About The Author: Jamie Napoli is enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, Class of 2012.