Bryce Elizabeth Yahn is a graduating Take 5 student at the University of Rochester studying cognitive science and mathematics.
Her Take 5 scholarship allowed her to take eight interdisciplinary courses exploring how photography can manipulate and interact with perception.
This project acts as the capstone for her Take 5 and was completed as an independent study under the mentorship of Professor Evelyne Leblanc Roberge.
You can contact Bryce at byahn2@u.rochester.edu or visit her photography website for more of her work.
This project grew out of an endeavor to use creative constraints as creative inspiration.
Due to COVID-19 and the uncertainty of the future, I was largely confined to my house,
and it seemed very unlikely that I would be able to do any sort of in-person gallery at the end of the semester.
My goal was to study how photography can manipulate perception, and I found both of these constraints incredibly frustrating and limiting.
I spent a long time generating concepts and then deciding that they wouldn’t work under the current conditions I was in,
since they largely involved other people, travel, or being outside which is not what I wanted to be doing all February in Rochester.
When I finally embraced my constraints and started using them to build my project, I found a lot more freedom than I had had before.
I first decided to create a website instead of a final gallery.
That allowed me to create a more interactive piece than would be possible with physical photos mounted on a wall.
I began looking around my house for inspiration,
and I found a wealth of colors, patterns, shapes, and shadows that became incredibly interesting when viewed closely and with curiosity.
I initially decided to replicate the outside world in my home, and later expanded that to documenting my world.
I merged the concepts of a website and exploring the world that is my house to create an interactive map so that the viewer could explore my world and choose the order in which they saw my photos.
As I photographed my house, I found that I was expanding and exploring my space.
There are so many ways in which the global pandemic has changed our lives,
but one of the simplest and most significant is just that we are stuck at home.
We aren’t out in the world.
We aren’t seeing new places or people.
The world shrinks down to the size of our homes.
And at the same time, the world has expanded into our houses, taking over spaces that once served single purposes.
We are working from home. Our bedroom is now our office and our gym and our studio and everything else.
People we once only saw in an office are now in our living room on our screens.
The separation of our house from the rest of the world no longer exists, but has created some hybrid world within our house.
Building a new world out of my house was in part a statement about perception and photography and COVID,
but it was also a way for me to re-imagine my own space. I walked through my house asking questions about what could be.
Is this butter tray actually a high speed train?
What in my house is a city?
What can I make out of the lint in my basement?
What I saw most clearly was the wide varieties of patterns in my house, and I used these to reorient the objects I was photographing into a vibrant new world.
When the photographing was over, I had the additional step of creating the map and describing my world in context with history and events and people.
This process helped me through the isolation of the pandemic by giving me creative control over my space.
House-19 is an experience unique to the COVID-19 global pandemic that explores the power of photography to transform the world through the lens,
and the power of the pandemic to transform the world outside and inside our homes.