Photo Document Proposal

For my photo documentary, I plan to document the subculture of the cafe-goers in Saratoga. More specifically, I’m going to take pictures of the people who work at and frequent Saratoga Coffee Traders. From what I can gather, this group of people includes college students, intellectual homeless people, wealthy tourists, and just regular townies. I have always found the “Coffee Traders crowd” to be an likable although rather elusive group of people that will hopefully prove interesting to photograph.
There are a wealth of things to photograph at Coffee Traders, ranging from coffee to bins of colorful vintage candy to just interesting-looking people hanging out. Given the friendly and accommodating aura of these cafe-goers, I don’t predict having difficulties photographing them. In order to seem more casual and less like an intrusive photojournalist, I might try talking to them for a bit before I commence picture-taking. This way, they will be less inclined to change my behavior when photographing them.

The attached reference photographs have both the subject matter and the warm aura that I'm trying to attain.

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(detail of birdhouse from one of my storybook photographs)

Take away the birdhouse from this photograph, and it would be dreadfully boring.

Like the jar that Wallace Stevens places on a hill in Tennessee, or the sculpture that Maeve photographed, the birdhouse rules the picture.

The birdhouse is small, yet extremely powerful. Stevens' jar is similarly small. But once he places it on the hill, there is order. If there were no birdhouse in the picture, we would not know where to look. The birdhouse, like the jar, creates a focal point; once it is there, we know where to direct our eyes, and we have, to some extent, created order in the wilderness.

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The Anecdote of the Jar
Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The wilderness, however vast and powerful, is subservient to the jar.

By placing the jar, Stevens has rearranged his M&Ms by color.

Is the jar civilization?

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"The spontaneous direction of energy flow is from organized to less organized forms."
- the second law of thermodynamics

It is human nature to try to organize things, to create order from disorder. Even adults will acknowledge the temptation to rearrange their M&Ms by color.


(photograph by Maeve Gilman, Emerson '10 art major; edited by me) This abstract sculpture is placed on a mount and, accentuated by the rather dubious placement of a trash bin, dominates the landscape. Without it, we would see a field with a few trees spaced at random intervals. But instead, the angular, unnatural stone sculpture takes precedence over the natural forms. I find the sculpture rather unpleasant. But undeniably, it creates order within the disorder of nature.