When sophomore Elissa Moy was planning UR Photography Club’s Rochester Photography Tour, she took inspiration from her weekly bus rides to Eastman for violin lessons.
Moy, the secretary of UR Photography Club, noticed landmarks on the bus ride that she thought would be worth photographing — some wall art on University Avenue, for example. Using Google Street View, she mapped out the walk from landmark to landmark.
At 2:40 p.m. during the tour, which occurred Saturday, Sept. 29, Moy, fellow e-board member Oion Akif, a sophomore, and eight attendees met to board the orange line., All carrying cameras, they boarded the bus to Eastman, where the walk began.
The first location on the list was the wall art, but the picture-taking began almost as soon as the group got off the bus. Photographers stopped to take photos of trees, houses, and roads. Ultimately, the tour was adjusted to accommodate for the amount of time spent taking photos between locations.
“I have been in this city for three years and have passed by the downtown many times,” e-board member junior Jiaxin Zhang said. “But with photographers we could spend our time discovering and focusing on every interesting [detail] of the city.”
The wall art on University Avenue was near a parking lot with some wall art of its own. Photographers took full advantage of the subjects in the area, like the wall art, plants, other photographers, and the empty lot itself. Later on in the walk, the group found — and photographed — a painter working on some new wall art.
The final location before going back to Eastman was Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park at Manhattan Square, where photographers took photos of the playground, lawn, trees, a puddle, fountain, and the memorial man-made waterfall.
Throughout the walk, it was clear that, for the photographers, the walks from location to location were almost (if not entirely) as interesting as the selected locations themselves. Moy commented that the way photography can transform seemingly uninteresting things is what interests her in the art form.
“What’s most interesting about photography to me is that you can take something that looks really ordinary — or even ugly. You can take a picture of that so it looks beautiful,” she said. “And that is just so fascinating to me.”
