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Rachel Bee Porter is an up-and-coming photographer who has captured people’s attention across the world and, as part of The University of Maine Intermedia MFA program’s 2011-2012 Visiting Artist series, she gave a lecture titled “It’s a Good Thing: Inspiration, Desperation, and Martha Stewart” in Lord Hall on Tuesday.
Right off the bat, one of the most interesting things about Porter was her refusal to use Photoshop on her photos. She seems to enjoy the feeling of putting in a hard day’s work.
Porter’s photographs are a perfect compliment to her vibrant personality. Her photos express great originality and the subjects range from a destroyed cake to tied-up humans. In the lecture, she showed and talked about some of her favorite and least favorite pieces. She also explained how she came up with ideas.
Porter showed the audience projects she worked on during college, explaining what she liked and disliked about each project, what was challenging and what the project meant to her. Everything she showed was beautifully vibrant and thought-provoking.
One of her collections, “The Joy of Cooking,” is based on a unique concept. The idea is, she would focus on a color scheme of food and silverware, drop them, then take pictures of the aftermath. The way the color schemes were used in these projects was breathtaking.
It’s important to note Porter cooked all of the food in her photographs by herself — she thought that was important, anyway. The remnants looked disastrous and spawned questions, but that was Porter’s goal. She wanted to make viewers think. Messes have never looked this good or interesting before.
In another interesting collection, “Remnants,” she stitched messes into her aprons from while she was cooking for previous projects. The way the photographs were taken, the stitching immediately becomes evident. Her collections had the central theme of messes, which she told the crowd she never realized until after college.
One of the final collections she showed, “Wallflowers,” was also great display of artistic expression. She took pies and threw them at a section of old wallpaper, then took a photo of the result.
Throughout her presentation, her commentary was charming, insightful and quirky. Porter has proven herself a hardworking and fantastically original photographer.
Like all good photography, words can’t do it justice. Porter’s artwork is available for viewing on her website, rachelbeeporter.com.
