By Vincent Purcell
-Vincent Purcell is a 2014 OSI Community Fellow-
My grandfather (Opa) and his family were painters and photographers for generations, and so I grew up with an appreciation for visual arts from a young age. My Opa photographed everything and kept thousands of meticulously cataloged slides. Around middle school, he gave me an old Minolta film camera, and I shot roll after roll and soon set up a darkroom in my bedroom–with my parents’ nervous consent. I developed a documentary approach to photography, continuing the archivist tradition I still maintain today.
In 2007, I attended The Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts in the Visual Arts: New Media discipline. Back then, we were a small group within Visual Arts, but today, the discipline is called Film + Photography. GSA provided me the very first opportunity to truly express myself as a creative person using dozens of media that I otherwise wouldn’t have tried or had access to.