The Curtains of Paul Devers
For this project, my partner and I took an adventure (with another friend as well) to Paul Devers Mental Institute in Taunton Massachusetts. The reason we went there, besides to take a ton of amazing pictures, was to scavenge for things that we could use for our portrait backdrop challenge. After travelling through a building and finding some articles we stuffed them in our backpacks and proceeded to another building. It was in the second building that the idea hit us. We determined that we would cut down varying curtains from every building considering that every building already had a different style curtain in every room. Finding the curtains was the easy job and after a couple hours of exploring all of our bags were full. We discussed the idea of how to represent all the curtains into one backdrop over some nice comfort food at IHOP. We were going to hang them all up in front of a window to show the age of the curtains by letting the natural sunlight pour onto the curtains and our subject matter would be someone looking through the windows as if there were enrolled in the mental institute. After some struggling with putting the backdrop together, we managed to wire them up in front of a well-lit window and began photographing, and these were the results: