BLOOD MOON

ARTIST STATEMENT (12/5/25)

When I started taking photography seriously, I began with shooting portraits. Over the past 2 years, I’ve expanded my range to landscapes, film, and other techniques, but recently I wanted to get back into portraits. Last summer, I was experimenting with a new type of photograph, lomography, which changes the whole color spectrum of the image. Green turns to purple, yellow becomes pink, and blue turns to green. This led me to creating this project, Blood Moon. When I explored the UCSD media lab catalog for the first time and spotted the Infrared Canon 5D Mark II I knew I had to try it out. I love trying out specialty cameras and cool processes like cyanotypes, so infrared immediately caught my eye and I began to brainstorm how to approach this project. I was greatly inspired by Richard Mosse’s project “Infra”, where he photographed the Congo on 16mm infrared film. The whole exhibition just feels insanely surreal, and I loved how the portraits looked with the changes in color due to infrared light. While Mosse focuses on utilizing infrared film to aestheticize the tragedy of war, I decided to use a digital infrared camera to construct my own fictional world. In order to do so, I first had to decide what I wanted to exist in this infrared world - the first things that came to mind were fences and the construction zone near my house, as well as plants and flowers. Over the course of the project I went on walks around my neighborhood and carefully selected what I wanted to exist in my world. Traffic cones? Yes. Trash bins? No. Traffic signs? Yes. As I continued to photograph using this method I began to pick up similarities between the items that I chose, such as reflective items interacting with the flash to create bright whites, and photos that had large areas of empty black space. I had a lot of trouble deciding how to order my photos, and landed on grouping them in groups of 2-4 photos, with each of them contributing to the overall atmosphere while having their own meaning and standing strong on their own. This project has been the most challenging for me as a photographer, solely due to how much I wanted my vision to be expressed through my technical skills. I changed my approach so many times over the last 10 weeks, and landed on something that I hope encapsulates any viewer, with context or without; the imaginary world of Blood Moon.