Every year, creative grad students from across the disciplines submit compelling images of their research and scholarship to the Image of Research competition. To accompany each image submission, the creator writes a short paragraph explaining how the image relates to their wider academic work, giving us a glimpse behind the scenes.
We caught up with some of the award winners from the 2024 Image of Research competition to ask them more about their process. Enjoy this interview with Nubras Samayeen, a graduate student in Landscape Architecture and 1st place winner in this year’s contest, and then view the video to hear Samayeen read her award-winning submission, "Architecture of the Land."
Why did you enter Image of Research this year?
Image of research has been a very lucrative platform for me to work. I love photography and I come from a design background. I am an architect, and I was doing a PhD in landscape architecture but initially in 2018 I submitted my work to image of research, and I failed in the sense that I didn't win. That research was not my dissertation, it was parallel research. I was doing urban duality, and I also lost a second time with my dissertation image. But finally, I have won so many awards in UIUC, I was adamant that, why am I not winning? So I read the instructions over and over again, and I realized this is not just merely a photograph or just an image. It is the process, it is the dedication, it is the information about your research, and that triggered my thought to even make what I made, the graphics of my research that reflects and speaks about my research work. Since it was my last year to participate before graduating, I wanted to make it count.
What was the process of coming up with your image?
I wanted to reflect on what I was doing in my research visually. While my dissertation is a write up, how do I explicate that in an image? The site of the focus of my dissertation is in the background. That is the National Assembly building complex designed by Louis Khan. What I was doing in the foreground is: dissecting it, investigating it, decoding it through various archival works, and that is basically breaking it down to pixels. How do I show that? Graphics that had the site or the architecture of the landscape in the background and the foreground were pixelated information that I gathered digging into the archives. The background image was taken in 2019 just before Covid in my last trip to Bangladesh as well as the papers and magnifying glass.
What did you learn or take away from this experience?
I learned that I shouldn’t ever give up. I’ve failed two or three times, but I was adamant to read the instructions carefully and do my best. It was not just an image from a photography exhibition. It was about how your image speaks about the research and the process. Finally, I realized that this was not an easy competition.
This interview was conducted by Brandon Stauffer, Videographer here at the Graduate College. Brandon came to the Graduate College with a background in journalism and is now working to showcase the impact of Higher Education at Illinois.
