2027 SPE Annual Conference: Community in Contrast
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print this page1-0: Photographing Remnants of What Used to Be
Josiah Montgomery
Saturday, October 17 - 9:30AM to 10:00AM
Hopkins 246
In a single word, vestigial can describe the remnants of something that once existed with greater prominence or something that no longer exists at all. Evidence of an interaction with the environment without its full context. Vestiges are realized in several ways in our lives. Whether it is the old car rusting in a field that was once someone's prized possession or a relationship that fell apart, it is an embodiment of the emotional connection people make between an object and its current state. My student presentation focuses on a body of work responding to vestigial as a concept and my personal interpretation of it in the context of fine art photography.
I had the opportunity to spend the Spring Semester of 2026 studying in New York City, where I was able to develop this idea into a body of work. Working in a new environment after living all my life in Central Ohio gave me the ability to experience the city as a new observer. I constantly took in information while being sensitive to my perspective as an Ohioan by approaching the environments I photographed with an objective eye. My goal was to have the work take place in the city, but not to be about the city, so that the emotional tone and peculiarities of the photographs would stand out more than the awe of the place where they existed.
With "momentum" being the theme of this year's conference, this body of work stood out as a recent and fitting interpretation of what form momentum can take in terms of realizing an intangible concept as a still image. The project itself consists of images all taken using "vestigial" as a grounding point for the subject matter. Some images serve as a literal interpretation, while others support the emotional tone of the series. Each of the images plays into the sense of something being haunted by its previous state of being, expressing that the subject matter is in some way a remnant of whatever it once was. Meant to provoke curiosity pertaining to how the subject matter found its way to its current state. The images are not taking an environment's current state of being as granted, but thinking about a past life and what events brought it to now.
The images, as a collective, package this idea into something digestible for a viewer and then ask where else we might find vestiges in our lives. It could be in terms of career, family, or connection with community. Or maybe we could be vestiges of our own selves. Naturally, there is no way to truly express the internal experience of these ideas, making this body of work important in that it acts as an agent for the concept to express itself without restricting it to the images themselves.
As a body of work, it engages a complex conversation around the momentum between the present and the past. In other terms, it expresses the transition from one to zero. One being where we started, zero being where we are going, but always tethered between the two.
speaker
Josiah Montgomery
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