Finding Purpose through Photography
Emma Tierney, a University of Minnesota freshman, is a double major in art and economics. Her combination of majors has led her to look at the world from an interdisciplinary perspective, and her ambition and curiosity has helped her achieve a great deal at a young age. Photography has taught her a lot about herself and what it means to push personal boundaries of creativity to learn something new.
What inspired you to choose your course of study?
I love photography more than anything and have always known that I wanted to study it in college and develop my skills in an educational setting. I decided on economics because I’m incredibly fascinated by how politics, psychology, and sociology all coincide when it comes to money and how it’s spent. I also love math, so it allows me to continue using math while also working with a social science.
What do you like to create?
I love creating photos that make people feel good about themselves, and that explore adolescence, femininity, and beauty. I aim to make photos that convey a specific mood and purpose, such as looking like an advertisement or making you feel kind of melancholy. Lately, I’ve been trying to explore series that really push my boundaries and get me out of my comfort zone, such as heavily pre-planned and constructed images taken in a studio setting and self portraits. Most of my work is of models and what I thought looked pretty in that moment, as opposed to images I came up with in my head. Turning the camera on myself is a great change of pace because it’s an exercise in self-esteem, and allows me to explore concepts that are difficult to verbalize to a model.
What are you working on right now?
I’m currently working on a series of self portraits in an attempt to get a little more comfortable with my own self-image. I just finished a series of constructed photos that were meant to push my boundaries in terms of constructing photos and doing heavy manipulation in Photoshop.
What brought you to the Department of Art?
During my time in high school, I competed in the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition with my photography. If you do well in this competition, you get to attend a ceremony at the Weisman Art Museum and have your work shown in Regis West. I still have an incredibly clear memory of walking across the Washington Avenue Bridge with my parents and seeing my art hung up in Regis. It was an amazing experience that I had the honor of going through three times, and only cemented that the U of M was where I wanted to be to further my photography skills. The West Bank Arts Quarter and the halls of Regis enchanted me. I was lucky enough to be given the honor of speaking at the Scholastic awards ceremony in March of this year as a keynote speaker, an opportunity I’m incredibly thankful for - I just hope that I inspired more future U of M art students.
What does the Dean’s First-Year Research and Creative Scholars Program (DFRACS) mean to you? What was your project?
One of the benefits of going to the U of M is the fact that we’re at an amazing research institution—this opens up so many more opportunities to the students here. However, students tend to wait until they’re upperclassmen to get involved with the research program. Thanks to the DFRACS program, many more underclassmen are getting involved with the research here, which then segues well into joining the UROP program later.
I worked with Howard Oransky, the Director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery in Regis East. Under his guidance, I worked on community outreach in order to promote the Fall 2020 exhibit, A Picture Gallery of the Soul.
How has the current switch from in-person to online classes impacted you and your learning?
I’m pretty lucky in the fact that my classes aren’t too much different now that we’re online. I don’t have access to the same facilities and resources I did at school for photography, but I can still take photos and display them for critique over Zoom. I can’t even imagine trying to do a studio class, such as ceramics or woodworking, during this distance learning. I do feel like I’m still learning, but it’s taking a lot more effort and accountability on my end.
If you had to point to one person who influenced your work by championing or challenging you, inspiring or inciting you, who would that be? What would you want to tell them about the work you are doing right now?
My lame claim to fame is that my dad’s cousin, JT Daly, is the lead singer of a band called Paper Route. JT also does some incredible visual art of his own, and used two of my pieces—one I had already created, and one commissioned—in a large-scale installment piece he did in a gallery in Nashville that was then turned into an album cover. By doing so, JT showed me that my art is worth something—that I have the ability to really do something with it. If I were talking to him right now, I’d want him to know how much he inspires me to keep creating and pushing myself.
If you could create and teach a new class on any topic, what would it be?
It’s super dorky, but I feel like there’s a ton to know about how the Instagram photography community used to be in 2012-2015, when I was first starting out. It was truly a different time, full of “feature pages” and “Instameets” and crazy drama. That era definitely shaped both me as a person and a photographer, and only the few friends I have from that era really understand it.
Who or what continues to inspire you to do your work?
The idea of eventually having my photos displayed somewhere is what drives me to keep going and improving my art—it’s a dream of mine to have my own exhibit somewhere someday.
What are the next steps you’d like to take with your art?
I’d like to start working on more editorial work—the sort of things you’d see in a fashion magazine, and I’d like to continue pushing myself to diversify my portfolio and take photos I wouldn’t normally take. I’d also like to take more candids to document my own experiences rather than just taking photos for the beauty of it.
What do you want to do after graduating?
While my dream is to be a photographer for music artists or a fashion photographer, those are pretty far off and will require a lot of hard work. In the years right after I leave the U of M, I’m planning on working in the business world in data analytics or some other branch of economics.
This story was written by an undergraduate student in Backpack. Meet the team.
