Mystery Factory

Just a few shots from another of my favorite places to shoot.  Next update, I'll post a bunch of the shots I've taken of models over the years here.

I don't know what the original purpose of the building is, but there are a lot of nifty little places to shoot and interesting things to check out there. I love that style of window and it's everywhere in that building.

This location is a different angle of the same room that contains the giant, red wheel.  It's part of the Armour Meat Packing plant (which I talk about here).  I love the color scheme that the room has and the state of disarray of the environment makes for an interesting story in my mind.  What mad science is going on in the far corners of the building?

I really like the high contrast with all of the intricate lines and shapes and even colors in the image. It's personally one of my favorite photos of the place.

Big Red Truck and HeadStone Roses

A dear friend of mine for many years had been suffering from a migraine.  Yes, that's right, a single headache that lasted for multiple years and caused all sorts of damage to this poor woman's life.  She called me one day to ask if I would be willing to drive with her to Springfield, stay overnight and then drive her home.  She was going to get a medical procedure that would hopefully help relieve the pain she'd suffered for so long.

We were driving back from the trip and saw a house on the side of the highway with some abandoned vehicles in front.  So I asked my friend and she agreed:  we should go check it out!  We got off the highway immediately and drove over to the building.  It looked like a house but because of the interior and the trash we found, we assumed it had to have been some kind of business or municipal building.

I got a couple of good shots of the vehicles, my favorite being below.

There was a cemetary next door which we hadn't noticed on the highway so we went over there to see what was up.  Plenty of small, mildly interesting headstones but not a lot worthy of photographing.  But something about the headstone above really resonated with me.  I loved the color contrast between the cloth roses and the polished granite headstone. 

Update on The Motive - Mrs. White

Thank you everyone so far for your support on this project.  We've still got a long way to go but as promised, since we reached the $500 mark, here is the first photo to be released publicly from The Motive.

It took me a long time to find the right model and a hallway that would work for my purposes.  The hallway was probably the hardest part though you wouldn't think that would be difficult.  I did shoot this show on a shoestring budget, though, and didn't want to rent locations if I could get out of it.

That being said, my friend Nicole was kind enough to let us use her upstairs hallway to shoot the photos for Mrs. White.  I wasn't sure if it would work but I'm pretty pleased with the result.  I wanted the photos to have a simplicity about them, so that it was easy to see the important parts of the art without a lot of distracting excess all over the place.  I would have loved to shoot this show in an old Victorian Mansion but didn't have one available.

If we can make the next goal of $1,000 I'll share another character from the shoot.  Whoever is the donor who puts us over the top will get to pick which of the five remaining characters to see!  Thanks again for your support and I am really looking forward to seeing where this goes from here!

The Motive

I'm Sean M Posey, and I love to take crazy pictures. Right now, I am contemplating six dastardly murders, but to make this project possible, I need your help.

If you choose to support me, you won’t be asked to move any bodies. You won’t be charged as an accessory to murder. Instead, you’ll help me launch a photography show about murderers, their psychology, and our perceptions of these two things.

........
At first glance, "THE MOTIVE" could easily be dismissed as a gimmick, using shock and visual cliches to elicit a response from the viewer.  But the intent of these pieces is actually to challenge our societal views on art, pop media, psychology, and crime.

Unlike other art shows, there is a motive for viewing these photographs, aside from appreciating their particular merits as art.  I want viewers to think about the people in the photographs, fictional though they may be, and use that as a mirror to consider them as real people and how they would behave.

........
So go check out the video I shot in the middle of the night and tell anyone you think might find it interesting!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-motive/x/3817548

The Council of Eyes also known as the dead fish picture

The image below might be a little creepy for some tastes and that's all right.  I can't imagine someone reading my blog and not being at least a little bizarre, a little twisted, so to most I'm sure it's fine.  It is, for those of you who are curious, a bunch of dead fish staring up at the camera.  Go look if you are interested, I'll wait right here.

Okay, now that it's out of the way.  My thoughts on this #photograph.

It strikes me, every time I see it, the line of dead staring at me, in a way that human corpses can't.  A line of them in this manner would be too much for me to take in, I wouldn't be able to look.  I don't have the stomach for real gore and death even while much of my art deals with those themes.  But give me a mirror and Medusa's gaze becomes much less unpleasant.

I had gone with my friend Claire to Seafood City, an Asian market on Olive in University City.  I took my camera along, well because that's why we went, to see if there was something awesome to shoot.  There are long rows of very colorful packages, lots of symmetry and a ton of cartoonlike characters and bizarre things to shoot.  When we got to the fishmarket side of the grocer, I was enthralled.

I actually took a lot of pictures of the fish that day, many varieties and colors, shapes and sizes.  This is my favorite shot for a lot of reasons, not the least is the aforementioned awareness in the eyes.  But I like the patterns in the photograph.  I like the colors.  And I really like the textures.  The combination of contrast, color, and composition (the three big C's in graphic design) really brings me to a stop every time I see it.

Yes, I know it's a little weird and a little dark.  But then again, so am I.

Incidentally, I highly recommend Seafood City if you are in the St Louis area and looking for Asian ingredients for cooking.  As you can see they sell fresh fish (much of it actually live) but they also offer all sorts of noodles and spices and even cereal from over the Pacific at a very reasonable price.  I like it more than Jay's because it's much bigger and doesn't have all the hipsters clogging the aisles.