Leica Women Foto Project Submission

Brief Project Statement

Close Friends is an examination of subculture aesthetics, feminine intimacy, and shared commonalities between groups of friends. Vastola employs close crops of film photographs she has taken over the last three years of her friends as a means to ritualistically analyze nostalgia and the bonds of friendship.

Details of Friendship, 2020

Details of Friendship, 2020

Kiss Kiss, 2018

Kiss Kiss, 2018

Details of Friendship #2, 2019

Details of Friendship #2, 2019

Take up Space, 2020

Take up Space, 2020

Cut Stone Cage, 2018

Cut Stone Cage, 2018

Heavenly Body, 2020

Heavenly Body, 2020

Social Awareness, 2020

Social Awareness, 2020

Hiding Softness, 2019

Hiding Softness, 2019

Revealing Softness, 2017

Revealing Softness, 2017

Associations, 2020

Associations, 2020

Artist’s Bio

Rose Vastola is an interdisciplinary, multimedia artist & performer whose projects often encompass elements of photography, music, design, sound engineering, film, and video. Her primary artistic focus of the past several years has been as creative director for her band, UV-TV, where she has inhabited every role from lead performer to video director and editor. In her work, Vastola has frequently addressed themes such as “Emotional Intelligence” (Medicine, 2019, Video), and “Environmental & Mental Health Crisis” (Happy, LP, 2019, UV-TV). Currently she is exploring ideas of social anthropology and fringe aesthetics through her photography project, Close Friends. She received her BA in Fine Art & Art Technology from the University of Florida in 2014 and currently resides in New York City.

Project Description

Since the advent of photography, the experience of nostalgia has rapidly evolved from that of a more group-based oral tradition to a much more visual, increasingly thorough, and significantly more individual experience of memory. For the Millenial and generations after, the invention of social media, affordable digital cameras, and later smartphones, contributed to a rapid jump in the documentation of their lives and an expansion in their ability to digitally manipulate and curate the presentation of their personal cultural aesthetics. For her project, Close Friends, Vastola explores the development of emotional bonds, commonalities of fashion, commodification of appearance, and the similarities of hyper-feminine style within her own friend group over the past 3 years. The project is intentionally, uncomfortably, intimate. She tightly crops each photo and presents the image in a near-evidentiary style. Her photos revel in the glamor of flaw: colorful dye jobs, gritty nails, sweat streaked eyeliner, cheap and chipped jewelry abound. Her medium choice is film: an act of resistance against the impermanence of easily manipulated digital photography and a fitting homage to the scrapbook and polaroid-snapped aesthetics of not-so-distant previous years.

Resource Summary