Photo project gives new meaning to ‘YouTube’

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Submitted by Susan Lakin

Susan Lakin photographed her neighbors Joyce and Joe in front of their Zenith TV set just days before it stopped working.

Photographer Susan Lakin has been so intrigued with the concept of reality TV that she decided to focus her camera lens on the real “stars” of hearth and home. During her house calls, she takes lights and camera equipment and literally moves in for the day paying artistic homage to their reflective images projected like a soft halo on their favorite television set.

Lakin, who hails from the West Coast, is an “honored-first-time” winning artist whose reality TV photographs will be on view at the Memorial Art Gallery’s 61st Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition. And although the RIT associate professor of photography in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences has lived and taught in Rochester for the past seven years, she still thinks like a commercial artist. “I left Santa Barbara to come here, and most people thought after my first winter of snow, I’d run back home,” Lakin says with a laugh. “I was working as a commercial photographer and I was instructed to do some airbrushing of the photograph to get that ‘perfect image.’ The experience made me very conscious of how we define beauty and how we falsify and manipulate images to get that sense of perfection.”

In the exhibition, Lakin has two photographs: one called Joyce and Joe, the other called Christine. Both are what Lakin calls, “reality-driven.” “Joyce and Joe are my neighbors on Rockingham Street, and I guess I’m pretty lucky to have shot their photo in front of their old Zenith TV because it died a week after I photographed them,” says Lakin. “But I’ve always been fascinated about the dominance of television sets in people’s homes, how we design our rooms around them. Plus, this phenomena of reality TV and how popular it has become, has really changed our lives. So I wanted my series to be a reflection of both.” Lakin says it’s technically challenging to photograph her reality TV series. “I have to re-light the room to get the proper illumination on the screen, so the TV—when it’s off—acts like a mirror. One of the hardest photos involved a dog and a cat—the dog was very cooperative but the cat kept running off and I had to chase it around and put it back in the picture.” “I find the students at RIT are so interested in new technology and how we interact with it,” Lakin says. “And I’m thrilled to have my work at the Memorial Art Gallery, which is one of the real jewels of Rochester.”