Marissa Nicholas

When I first went to South Congress between Oltorf and Cesar Chavez, there was an overwhelming amount of objects, subjects and landscapes that I could photograph. What mostly caught me eye though were all the unique and individual buildings. Every restaurant, clothing shop, hotel and the works used different materials to construct their building. Some used industrial materials like concrete and others used natural materials like wood. With the Gestalt principles in mind, I decided to take close up shots of the individual materials that make each building different from the next.

The way we form images is literally quite mind blowing. Our minds use Gestalt principles like grouping, repetition, containment and so forth to form the whole, or in other words images we can understand. With the complexity of our world, it would be hard to understand and differentiate an object or building as different from another object or building next door without he self-organizing tendencies in our brains. Within my photos I focused on similarity, symmetry, repetition and grouping. I purposefully took close up images of different materials throughout South Congress because I wanted the viewer to be able to mentally feel the texture and be able to see the buildings down to their core.

Overall I really liked how my collection of photos turned out. Although the collection is small, and I would have liked to discover more unique buildings, I like how my photos show repetition and similarity and in turn allow the viewer to feel and see texture and design. We group things that are similar, and that forms the whole. All in all I had a good time discovering and breaking down how we form images.