Elegy

Katherine Miles first started photography as a hobby after her mother bought her camera to record her travels.
“I would try and take the picture as if someone was standing next to me,” she said. “It’s not that I just wanted to remember I was here, but I wanted people to see and feel the same things that I did, so I kept coming up with these creative ways to take them.”

This photo series was done as a part of a project done for her Honors Photography II class with Professor Chip Cooper. The topic for this project was the word “Elegy”, which Miles tried to approach differently.
“Anytime [Cooper] gives us a word I write out the obvious things that I think most people will try to present and I just throw it away,” she said. “I make sure not to do any of those because I don’t want to look like anyone else.”
For Miles the creative process always involves coming up with the unobvious.
“It makes it harder, but you think about the world differently,” she said. “If I had to give any advice it would be to take the obvious and twist it and make it your own.” Miles said the idea came from thinking about the dead’s point of view.
“With elegy I thought ok it’s a poem that laments on the dead so instead of focusing on we should praise the dead, I was like well “What are the dead thinking?” and spin it differently,” she said. Katherine Miles is a senior majoring in psychology and criminal justice.