An Evil Art: Expression Through Words
…And another semester comes to an end!
For the past three months, I have been following Malevolent MC for a semester-long project for my Documentary Photography class. If you have been following my blog for a while, you probably know of him or will recognize him from previous photo shoots that I’ve done with him. Over the past two weeks, I wrote a story to accompany the photos I captured from the 6-7 times that I met with him throughout the three months and assembled the material into a magazine-style documentary spread. I have been anticipating this moment of finally being done and being able to publish it to my blog!
Please note that due to image sizes, downloading may be slow.
Please also read my comments below the gallery.
Enjoy!
“An Evil Art: Expression Through Words
…A photography documentary on the life of Malevolent MC, a freestyle hip hop artist living in the suburbs of Salt Lake City.”
Commentary:
I originally wanted to use “malevolence” as part of the theme but found supporting it with a story and images would be difficult, so it was changed to “the life of”.
There were many accommodations made on both mine and Malevolent MC’s part. For me, it was having to make myself available to attend his scheduled events/performances, since they would happen only one time. This meant having to miss school some nights.
I wasn’t really into the whole hip hop/rap scene before the project, but having followed Malevolent MC really opened my eyes to the “foreign” culture and I did find myself enjoying the events, in particular: the Rap Battle and his opening performance at Kilby Court.
From the 6-7 times that we met, I had taken over 300 photos, yet I only chose to incorporate 16 of them into the documentary. The ones I chose, I feel, really display Malevolent MC’s story. In the text I describe a lot of things in detail so I wanted to give a visual to perhaps the more significant or interesting ones, for example: the photo of the crowd hollering to “vote” him into the next round and the photo of burning incense.
All placing of images is relative to the text and to each other. For example, the photo of his shoe collection would only make sense if placed on the same page as the text that describes it.
You may have noticed that the documentary starts out with the Rap Battle. Rather than placing that towards the end, I wanted to entice people with the rather interesting imagery. Metaphorically, on another note, it represents how we see an artist as just a performer instead of realizing the amount of work that is first put in before they are able to actually perform.
Lastly, let it be pointed out that all photos are black and white. Initially, desaturation of the images was brought because there were usually too many colors in each shot, making them confusing and the colors distracting. By making them black and white, I hoped to reduce that effect. However, from interviewing Malevolent MC, he mentioned that he views his music in “shades of gray” because he is still trying to find his musical identity, and using black and white took the issue of ‘identity’ out completely.
I hope you all enjoyed it. I’d like to thank everyone for being so patient with me this semester, especially with the lack of blog posts. However, now that school is out…you all know what that means: we’re back in business, baby!
Expect a continuance of great photography soon 
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