It’s not so easy to explore mountain ranges or interact with the diverse population of Princeton’s township during the school year. For student artists at Princeton, summer is the time to delve into passions otherwise untouched during a busy school year. This summer offered a chance for two members of the Class of 2026 to put on a creative lens.
Visual Arts, Jules Martin ’26
Jules Martin ’26, an Art and Archaeology major on the Practice of Art track, started sketching out her summer during her spring semester. She shaped her project proposal around polaroid photography and received the Lewis Center for the Arts Alex Adam ’07 award. This award, established in memory of Alexander Jay Adam ’07, provides each student $7,500 toward the creation of new art during the summer.
“I’ve always … been drawn to taking photographs of my own family and the landscapes around home,” Martin told The Daily Princetonian. Her project entailed exploring these main subjects through the theme of decay: her grandparents’ aging process and the effect of local wildfires on the natural environment.
After settling back in her hometown of Truckee, Calif., Martin spent time working closely with her grandparents, saying they felt “almost like collaborators.” She particularly reflected on their elderly lives and explored thematic details through seemingly inconsequential parts of the day, such as taking photos of her grandparents getting ready for bed.
“I wanted the portraits to be more intimate,” Martin told the ‘Prince.’ “I was thinking a lot about subject matter, like the aging process and watching them age in my own lifespan.”
Martin also captured the landscapes that shape her hometown, taking her digital camera and her medium format film camera on a backpacking trip for a few days. On the trip, she discovered an area she once hiked through had been burned down by a wildfire, and she became acutely aware of how much her home had changed.
“I was taking a lot of photos of dead wood or dead trees or these different things I felt like were kind of paralleling my grandparents.”
In some of the project’s polaroid photos, Martin employed polaroid emulsion. This technique allows an image to be lifted off the polaroid and adhered to another surface, creating a layered image effect. Martin used the final polaroid emulsion lifts when photographing the alpine lakes surrounding her hometown.
“In my project proposal, I had written about submerging the floating polaroid emulsions in lakes and trying to document how they move underwater,” she said. According to Martin, her initial plan was upended when she experienced difficulties with submerging the delicate polaroid emulsions in the lake.
An underwater camera dome used to adhere and capture images of the polaroid emulsions.
Photo courtesy of Jules Martin.
As a result of additional research on lighting, camera focus, and underwater camera housing, Martin soon pivoted. As Martin explained, she successfully submerged the polaroid emulsions by attaching them to a glass lens port of an underwater camera. The final element allowed her to exhibit the decay of the photographs, almost as a lens, layered before the underwater background.
As Martin returns to campus for senior year, she is preparing to present her work at a later this academic year. Therefore, although the summer is over, Martin carries the memories of photographing her grandparents back to Princeton.
“One of my favorite parts of the creative process is getting back into the studio after taking photos and being out in the field,” Martin said, as her project continues to unfold this year.
Members of Princeton Summer Theater sit together in front of the set of the musical The Bridges Over Madison County.
Photo courtesy of Zach Lee.
Theater, Zach Lee ’26
Zach Lee ’26 found his artistic calling in the high energy and spirited work of Princeton Summer Theater (PST), where he is an actor and the publicity director. Over the summer, PST debuted three mainstage productions, offering an end-of-season Cabaret, a children’s show, and various workshops. PST’s second show was Ken Ludwig’s “The Game’s Afoot,” followed by Nick Dear’s adaptation of Frankenstein.
Lee is a former associate Audience editor at the ‘Prince.’
Lee’s work with PST was extremely fast-paced with “each of the turn-arounds for the shows [being] very, very quick and rigorous.” The student theater company’s first mainstage production of the summer premiered with the musical “The Bridges Over Madison County.” According to Lee, it was "really fun to play [Bud] and be able to perform and sing.”
Many of the actors who perform with PST also hold leadership positions within the group. As publicity director, Lee reaches out to theater critics in town and runs the social media.
Reflecting on the difference between school year and summer theater, Lee noted a change in audience and demographics with the lack of undergraduate students on campus. According to Lee, the summer audiences were “mostly the older folk who live in the town or live in nearby towns who know about Princeton Summer Theater [and] are returning viewers.”
PST also delivered shows catered to children. According to Lee, “there’s a bunch of parents who are like, ‘Oh my God, what can I do with my kids that is not in the sun during the hot Princeton days?’” PST had an answer. Lee acted in a children’s adaptation of the Odyssey playing roles such as a Greek suitor, Calypso, and a Cyclops.
Lee also worked with the company to host children’s theatre workshops, stating, “It’s a good way [for the kids] to exert energy and the parents are very happy because their children are tired afterwards.”
Lee, a Spanish and Portuguese major pursuing minors in Journalism and Theater, will apply the skills he learned at PST to his independent artistic work this fall. After studying in Seville, Spain the summer before his junior year, Lee has already decided on a topic. “I know that I want to use Flamenco … maybe it’s a show, maybe it’s an album,” he said.
Ysabella Olsen is a member of the Class of 2028. She is an associate editor for The Prospect. She can be reached at yo7647[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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