(Clicking on any of the pictures or text here will launch the album in a separate window - flash player needed)

My undergraduate BA thesis for my degree in photography for the department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University consisted of sixty 4” by 6” photographs sequenced in a small leather-bound album.

The final images were edited from over 10,000 slides taken of the same person  - my significant other during college, and were shot over a three year period.

For this project, I used three different point and shoot cameras and never purposely set up any of the images, taking on a “personal documentary” snapshot approach similar to the methodology of Nan Goldin.  However, ultimately the images are much more about fantasy than they are about reality, less like a diary and closer to a fictional narrative.

They are also similar to the early pictures of Cindy Sherman in the way one person serves as a screen in which we project society’s ingrained ideals of beauty and privilege.  Instead of the film stills of the 1950’s, the subtext for these images were from homoerotic modern day fashion images such as the Abercrombie and Fitch print advertisements from the late 1990’s. 

Ultimately though, they are sixty pictures of someone that I was very intimate with - a young and almost carefree love that now carries more burden as politics, maturity and age complicate my understanding of my queer and racial identity.  They are in many ways then a marker of something that I can’t go back to, much like many of the fondly remembered photographs stored in our almost forgotten albums, somewhere gathering dust.

                                  -- Jeff Sheng, 2008