Not many can say they changed their majors in order to follow their past.
Tara O’Connor, 23, is attending the College of Fine Arts at ASU. She is planning to finish her B.A. in December. Photography is her focus, but it hasn’t always been that way.
“I was going to be a teacher,” she says. O’Connor started her ASU career at the West Campus, majoring in elementary education.
“After a year and half of school I was like ‘no,’ ” she says. “I definitely wanted to pursue photography.”
O’Connor didn’t want a job that was so rigid, “where you have to follow all these rules or you’re going to get fired,” she says.
“It’s not that I hate kids. I love kids,” O’Connor says quickly. “I want to be a mom really, really bad but I couldn’t take care of other people’s kids — that’s what it would feel like.”
O’Connor switched to the Tempe campus and changed her major to photography for the spring semester of 2005. She then moved from Peoria to Tempe in July 2005.
O’Connor’s passion for reminiscence stems from her childhood.
“Growing up, my mom was really big into documenting everything — always pictures of all the birthday parties and everything like that,” O’Connor says. Once O’Connor was old enough, she started taking her own pictures.
“I just think documentation is really interesting,” O’Connor says. “There are people and families who don’t do it at all — maybe take pictures once a year when they go to JCPenny or something like that.”
O’Connor says she started off by keeping scrapbooks and dressing up her sister for amateur glamour shot sessions.
Tara O. Photos started in the beginning of 2007, with a few photographs on her MySpace page. She then created a separate page for her photography. http://TaraOPhotos.com soon followed, as well as a profile with http://ModelMayhem.com.
“At first, I was just putting up stuff I had already done from my classes or I had done on my own,” she says. “For all of 2007, I was taking pictures of my friends and improving my skills — but it was hard because I had a really simple point and shoot.”
That all changed one Christmas morning when O’Connor received a Canon Rebel XTI from her father. This is her baby.
O’Connor specializes in pin-up, promotion and live band shots, weddings, engagements and family and highschool senior portraits. She has worked with such bands as Creepsville666, Koffin Kats, Left Alone, Against Me, Mad Sin, Zombie Ghost Train and Andrew Jackson Jihad. She has also worked with a few clothing companies such as Heartbreaker Fashion and Psycho Clothes.
O’Connor describes these clothing companies as a subculture, a general type of rockabilly style. “It’s nice to have something classic,” she says.
Mandie Becker, owner of Heartbreaker Fashion in Covina, Calif., says O’Connor did some of the first photos for their Web site.
“The best way I can describe it is that they’re real,” Becker says of O’Connor’s photos. “She takes a different approach with photography — she truly does use it as an art form to express herself.”
Becker says O’Connor is both polite and brutally honest with her photography. “She’s not just shooting to take a pretty picture,” Becker says.
O’Connor list some of her influences: Shannon Brooke, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Via Van Story, Sally Mann, 666Photography, Barbara Kruger — all of them female photographers like herself.
After graduation, O’Connor hopes to simply continue what she’s already doing. O’Connor says she’s too realistic to think she’s going to have her own studio anytime soon.
“If I had my own studio, I’m afraid it would force me to be not as inventive,” she says. “I do everything out of my house or at a park.”
What O’Connor means by house is actually an oversized closet. Boxes of makeup, jewelry and props wait for people to pick them up, to try them on. O’Connor and her photo subject either stay in or go out and hit the town. O’Connor’s roommates know the score.
“One of my roommates has lived with me since I moved to Tempe so she couldn’t give less of a shit,” she says.
Anyone could find themselves in O’Connor’s home or closet for a shoot. “It’s all different people, I don’t really have an audience,” O’Connor says. “If someone gives me just a little bit of their personality, it’s really easy to run with it — to create something really cool.”
With school, a small business and a vegetarian appetite, O’Connor is a busy girl. However, pointing and shooting is always better than grading papers, she says. She knows unquestionably she made the right decision when she switched career paths.To one where her passion lies.
“I got this from my mom, that’s where my passion comes from,” O’Connor says. “She just passed it on to me.”
Reach the reporter at lauren.cusimano@asu.edu.
