Zachary Milligan-Pate

What is your senior thesis?

My project has a simple and iterative method: I walk the city at night photographing as I go. Last February I was mugged and attacked at night and I believe that this project is a way for me to process and explore those feelings. It's not necessarily therapeutic, in fact it is often solitary and disconcerting to be out late at night, alone, photographing. But I think that I can use photography as a way to build off of this experience and to channel its negativity into a creative area of my life.

What motivated you to start this project? What inspires your creative process?

The project arose circumstantially, as I have only 7pm-7am free to photograph and I have always been interested in the photographic tradition of exploring and documenting what one finds.

Do you work in film or digital? Please describe any technique or process relevant to your project.

I shoot 4x5 black and white film, and scan and print digitally. The view camera forces me to observe and move much slower than I am used to in my daily life. This makes the processes of physically looking and photographing more laborious and at the same time more encapsulating.

Is this a new project or a continuation of previous work?

I have always had an affinity for photographing at night and this project is a new manifestation of an old habit.

How has your work developed or changed over time?

When I began taking nighttime walks in the city and photographing, the images were more reserved and often focused on the presence or absence of people. I found myself struggling to find my subject. But as I have continued to photograph at night, I discovered that the process is the subject and that the world we live in is transformed at night into one of silence.

What artists or works of art have inspired or influenced you?

I have been inspired by the way that Eugene Atget observed Paris, using the camera in its most utilitarian, observational ways, and how Walker Evans looked at the world with a straight forward view that let it speak for itself. I find myself coming back to the way that Robert Adams explored the American west, especially the Denver years, and the way that Michael Kenna distorts the night.

What kind of response do you hope to get from your viewers? Is there a certain experience you want people to take away from your photographs?

I want the viewer to come away feeling that the places and views common to some are always different for others, that familiarity and comfortability are relative.

What is the ideal setting to view your work? Do you picture your photographs in a book? In a gallery?

I create the work imagining it in a gallery but I am interested in the portfolio box, with the viewer pulling prints and handling them. I think that this personal experience of handling the prints and interacting with them is interesting, although somewhat problematic; the prints are sensitive and time consuming to make!

Do you have any ideas or plans for future work?

As this is my thesis project, I plan to continue it to some sort of ending at the end of this year, but I do not plan to really end this project until I feel that it is done. I have been working on a series of still lives since last year and plan to continue working in the studio too.

What do you see yourself doing after graduation?

I plan on attending graduate school in photography and then education, hopefully moving out west to Colorado or the southwestern U.S.