Final Project Proposal

(Photo of my father and his brothers that I found)

For my final project I really wanted to get into my family's roots, especially my parents. All through out my childhood my parents never had pictures of themselves growing up around the house, besides the one baby picture displayed on the mantel. My father recently found a bunch of color negatives from the late 1950's and I was extremely excited to get into them to get a better understanding of how he grew up. Through out the semester I have been scanning all the photographs in that he found and they are quite compelling, due to the time difference and subject matter. Over Thanksgiving break I am going to go through my mothers photographs, from the 1970's, and choose ones that juxtapose my fathers. She grew up in a lower middle class family in the Netherlands and he grew up extremely privileged in Greenwich, Connecticut. I want to explore how these two completely different people, from different backgrounds ended up together.
I will be printing these photographs with the Gum printing process because I wanted to make sure that the colors of the photographs are still portrayed. I was lucky that my fathers negatives were in color and I feel that if I were to print them without the color it would take away from the power of the images. There were a surprising amount of images with extraordinary colors that I wanted to take advantage of. A challenge that I might have to face is that a lot of the photographs that I am taking from are from different processes: color slides, color 35mm film and my mother has printed out color photographs. I want to make the photographs appear to be from the same medium or else I feel they won't hold up as a collection as well.
This is a concept that I believe I will be adding onto for years to come, maybe expanding to my grandparents in the future, but I am excited to get the idea started.