The last week of classes is here, and finals season inches closer with every passing day. When you find yourself needing a break from the books between now and when you leave UNC for the summer, take some time to view the "people | place | perception" photo exhibition in the Union Underground Gallery.
The photo exhibition contains film photography and digital photos taken and created by students in the ARTS 515: Advanced Photography course taught by Professor Gesche Würfel. The exhibition serves as a display for each of the students’ semester-long projects, where they chose an overarching theme for their pieces in the class.
The topics of the photos cover a number of territories, ranging from specific issues such as the gentrification of the Fort Bragg military industrial complex and the effects of the 2014 coal ash spill in the Dan River, to more broad subjects such as ballet dancing and contemporary fashion.
For Würfel, having each of her students pursue and photograph very different topics that they were passionate about ultimately served in creating the overarching theme of focusing on people, places and others’ perceptions of the topics and issues.
“I think all of the projects deal with people in one way or another,” Würfel said. "In some images, the people are absent, and in others, they are present. I think everybody’s work is about people in one way or another, but also about place. Every image is made in a certain place. And then it’s also all about perception, like how we perceive space or certain developments. That’s also the title of the show, but these are the three combining terms of these works.”
Alexa Blazevich, a senior media and journalism major and former Daily Tar Heel writer, said she enjoyed the freedom of being able to pick her own topic that she likes interacting with and taking photos of. For her, the class and the exhibition’s goal is to allow students the opportunity to photograph what they enjoy the most.
“Everyone has a different goal, but the common goal is to photograph the thing that you care about most while you’re still in school and still have the freedom to choose what you want to photograph instead of being on an assignment or working on commission,” Blazevich said.
Senior studio art major Jubal Strube chose to show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease for his topic. He said he has personal ties to the topic because his grandmother died from the disease.
“My project is mostly a grieving process,” Strube said. “My grandmother passed away back in December, so this project, for me, was just working through things and figuring out where I’m at mentally.”
