Jim Lind Photo

Here’s the nicely written article from American Photo on Campus…

The composites of SCAD’s Jim Lind augur the end times.

Early this year Jim Lind was laid off from his part-time job, found himself reading nothing but bleak news about the economy, and felt an overall malaise. “Not a lot was going right for me, or the world in general,” he says. “I wanted to find a creative way to channel and get past that.” The result was a carefully rendered group of images the SCAD senior calls “City of Exile.” Taking its name from a popular fantasy novel, the series presents a grim landscape that evokes the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max films. Yet Lind’s ultimate goal was to show how resilient human beings can be when challenged by difficult circumstances-hence, a businessman calmly faces a burning house, and a well-dressed couple dines gamely at a long table in what appears to be a garbage dump. The images are all composites. “I’ve always been more interested in what you can do with an image than what you actually see through the camera,” he says. Lind used Photoshop to insert a New York City skyline behind what was, in reality, a snowy Vermont landscape; turn day into night in his shot of a parking lot; and set an abandoned house on fire. While the post-production work consumed Lind’s “every waking hour for several months,” he says, he still plans to specialize in this kind of manipulation. In fact Lind is already creating storyboards and shooting backgrounds for his next project. Like “City of Exile,” the new series is inspired by real events in Lind’s life-his pending graduation and the daunting prospect of stepping into the working world. Its title? “Into the Unknown.” -MIRANDA CROWELL