Ella C. Baum is a Junior at New York City Lab High School for Collaborative Studies. As a dual citizen of Sweden and the United States, Ella has spent her life between her family’s minuscule apartment in lower Manhattan and her family’s summer house in rural Southern Sweden. At the age of 5 her grandmother awarded her the nickname of “eagle eye” for her keen attention to detail. Today she continues to strongly value the unparalleled human ability to observe. When she isn’t working on a never ending supply of school work she can often be found: reading, writing, partaking in multiple extracurricular activities, photographing, observing, gathering with friends in order to analyze the surrounding world, and creating.
As a photographer I am interested in pictures that ask us to look at the world in unexpected ways. In this series I made the choice to take pictures that stress such compositional elements as: shape, texture, color combination, light, shade, and depth of field in order to to evoke poetic interactions with my environment. By focusing on detail and relatively close up views of my subjects, I have sought to create a visual narrative that interrupts our expectations, and offers an alternative view.
Over the course of this NYU Future Imagemakers session I have taken advantage of the opportunity to utilize a digital camera by always having it with me. As a result I have been on the constant look out for an interesting composition. Late one winter night with scaffolding above me, I stopped to photograph. Having noticed the captivating contrast between the sumptuous dark blue hue of the night sky and the alarming fire hydrant red of a construction light bulb, I was excited by the uncanny way each illuminated the neighboring figures. My aim with my photographs is to explore the visual story behind images that will take us to a place beyond ordinary verbal interactions.