Whit Forrester
Photography MFA
My name is Whit and I am a second year student in Columbia’s Photography, MFA program.
TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WHAT YOU WERE DOING BEFORE YOU CAME TO COLUMBIA.
Just prior to coming to Columbia I was living in Northern California working within the medical Cannabis industry, and working on photographic art at the Rayko Center in San Francisco. I was also working on my Portuguese, and Spanish, thanks to Duolingo, and continuing to investigate what decolonization looks like for me.
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE COLUMBIA FOR YOUR GRADUATE STUDY?
Columbia’s photography MFA program is one of the top 10 in the country, with the increasingly rare color darkroom, black and white darkrooms, digital labs, mural printers, 3-D printers, vinyl printers, experimental darkrooms…. On top of that I was interested in the work the professors were pursuing. Being by the lake and in the midwest was also attractive – Chicago basically has all the perks of a big city with relatively easy access to wide open space and nature.
TELL US ABOUT A PROJECT YOU’RE WORKING ON THAT YOU’RE EXCITED ABOUT.
My current work is focusing on the relationship that we have to the natural world within our built environments and how that connects back to the processes of colonization and Empire. I have recently started to investigate ways in which UV photography can be used to show relationships between these things which are not obvious to the naked eye, and to also develop a practice in affiliation with a local greenhouse which allows me to pursue growing my own plants in larger aggregations than before.