Artist Book Summary

My artist’s book is a visual representation of both the collective memory of my family and my own personal (autobiographical) memory that has been formed based on their existence and our shared memories. It involves how each individual’s life and experiences has formed their own identity and in turn how each of their individual identities has formed the overall identity and memory of my family as a whole.
The way in which I physically manifested this particular facet of memory was by including not only pictures of all of my immediate family members (and my grandparents as well because they represent where we came from) but gradated images from different life stages of each person. I employed this device to manifest how they changed and created new memories as they aged, thus creating who they are today, and I put all the pictures together in this book so as to manifest how all of these individual identities form our singular family unit. In this way, each person visually adds to our collective family memory. I also stressed certain relationships among the individuals. My parent’s relationship, for example, is demonstrated specifically by the repetition of their picture together. There is also specific symmetry among the images and pages of the two older and younger sets of siblings. This is due both to page positioning and the relationships that exist between us.
The work is prefaced by my two sets of grandparents, and then bookended by the same image of the rest of my family, a repetition that I think is vital in demonstrating that all of these individuals are members of one family unit. Because of this repetition I have not included an artist’s statement; it should be self-explanatory.
The whole book is contained in a very plain, simple black casing with soft thin beige pages that I glued together to attain the desired thickness and opaqueness. I thought the simplicity of the book was attractive and was a good way to display something as intricate as a family. The book’s simplicity contrasts the depth represented by the photographic content.

Shelby and Sylivia's Book: The Final Project

So this blog will probably be similar to what I present on Monday when I talk about Shelby and Sylvia's book, but I think it's important to include their version of this project in my blog. Shelby and Sylvia from the beginning wanted to do their project together because they thought that since their lives were so intertwined that they simply couldn't come up with two different ideas. Why should they? They thought. This always struck me as rather weird; Sylvia's hesitation to separate her life from her husband's. She was loathe to do anything without him, and at one point told me that her life began when she married him. She often deferred to him during our project too. What a different age we live in. I'd like to think my life will begin before I marry. Regardless. The final version of Shelby and Sylvias's project is called, Stops Along the Way: A Photobiography. Their project centered on the many travels they have embarked upon in their lives. They spent ten years living in Hong Kong; two of their children even graduated high school there. This time spent abroad both facilitated and encouraged them to travel, and increased their love for it. They have visited over 70 countries, and told wondrous stories about many of them. Their apartment is evidence of their love of other cultures: nearly everything in their apartment is from Hong Kong, when I entered it there was barely any evidence of America at all.
The majority of their book centered on this traveling, and is divided into sections based on the many places they have visited. They have traveled everywhere; I am really very jealous of their existence and ability to travel all over the world the way that they have. My favorite pictures, of course, are those taken of the ducks in Boston Garden, and of the sailor in Gloucester, MA, both so close to where I live! I love Massachussetts. Even as their years increase, they continute to travel. Just two weeks ago they took a ride in an air balloon over the area, something I've always wanted to do.
In addition to traveling, the Reaves devoted the whole first section of their book to friends and family, despite the fact that they wanted to make the photo book mostly about travel. Their friends and family were just so important to them that the first few pages are entirely devoted to those people they know and love.
I really loved getting to know Shelby and Sylvia Reaves. Their perspective on life was very educational and I really loved the experience. They were very kind to us and I think Alexis and I both had a very good and educational time with them. I haven't been able to spend much time with my grandparents over the years for several reasons, and this was a nice way to spend time with people in a similar generation.
I really like this aspect of our honors class.

Synesthesia

http://www.ahornmagazine.com/issue_6/essay_shea_jsb/essay_shea_jsb.html

Dawn sent us this article this week, and upon reading it, I found I was absolutely fascinated by this idea of synesthesia. I've heard the word before, I know what it is, I had a friend in high school to whom this happened, but she could never explain it to me in a way I understood that well. Really the most contact I've had with this concept is in my literature classes, specifically my spanish literature classes, the word is "sinestesia" and comes up in poetry a lot. Oddly enough, for a few years I only knew the word in spanish, I did not know what its english counterpart was. :p In literature, it means when one type of imagery-esque description elicits another sort of sensory response, or when one sense incorporates another. But this isn't an article about poetry, it's about the actual phenomenon of Synesthesia. The idea that someone could (and does) "hear sights, see noises, and touch smells" absolutely astounds me, especially the fact that I probably did as a baby. I really wish we didn't get childhood amnesia, and I could actually remember my experiences from early childhood and infancy.
This whole idea of "hearing sights" or "touching smells" really reminded me of Proust and the madeleine and the whole concept of memories from the past being stirred by present sensations, smells, or experiences. I realize the two concepts are not the same, but I couldn't help but think of Proust as I was reading this article and looking at these pictures. The mixing of the different senses is reminiscent of our environment stimulating our memories, and I really liked that. I wonder what it's like for the letter "A" to "feel" red. What is it about our brains that is constantly trying to get our different senses to mix with each other or to evoke different sorts of things?
The article specifically speaks to everything I just said in the paragraph:

"Artists frequently attempt to mediate the space between art object and viewer perception. Ostensibly that space involves eliciting synesthetic-like interpretation of artistic gestures, although rather than causing an actual synesthetic experience, the visual information triggers specific emotional histories that lead to cross-sensual engagement. If one’s response to an object or image is visceral, often specific personal memories are recalled. That archive usually contains information that refers to not just sight, but also touch, taste, smell, etc. Although synesthesia is a neurological condition that cannot simply be willed by the unafflicted, the effect of this type of response to art work mimics a genuine synesthetic experience. In both cases, the stimulation of one sensory organ gets channeled through more than one cognitive pathway."

This obviously explains everything better than I can, and it brings together all my ideas on memory and synesthesia. Everything is just so much less black and white than I thought it was. Just as so much connects between memory and photography in this class, and just as we're learning about all the different ways in which that occurs, so does synesthesia seem to represent this coming together of different ideas and disciplines. The whole concept is fascinating, and I sort of wish I could experience it so as to truly understand the concept. Is this way of exeriencing the world distracting? I wonder...or do those with this talent (or condition), as it were, simply accept it as reality and not realize that not everyone is this way. It's also interesting how art plays upon this whole idea that actually occurs in human beings by trying to create it visually.

This picture is really wonderful to me, and really expresses for me what this article was trying to say.

The Project Continues

This week I met with Dawn to try and give my project a clearer purpose, point, and destiny :p. As I was coming up with my idea for this project and thinking about how to portray memory and the photograph in a visually stimulating manner I was getting very caught up in the importance of exactly how this would happen, ie the specifics of how it fulfilled those "requirements." What Dawn helped me realize, however, was that this project was more about the overall idea of how memory and photography evoke each other and affect each other, while I was really concerned with doing it in a very specific way dealing with a very specific mode of memory. I was really concerned that my project concern personal memory or collective memory yadda yadda. Instead she showed me that I should deal with the visual relationship between the photographs and what they stood for instead of trying to fit it into some sort of idealized schema. Thus I am not longer sticking to my physical "family tree" idea but am instead branching out (pun unfortunately intended) to what each picture represents to me and to each other. Each page will still deal with a collection of photographs of close family members and the relationship these photographs have to me, to them, to each other, and to my own personal memory as well as my family's.
I still like the idea of gradations of age of members of my family, and each page will focus on one person and their different life stages, but I may vary the number of images, and I will certainly manipulate where they are on the page and think about that in a more aesthetic manner. For instance, I will have a page devoted to my mother, with several different types of images of her at different times in her life, but instead of just focusing on the fact that she, as all other people do, grew up, I will instead focus on how the images relate to each other visually, how they complement each other, and I will think of interesting ways to show that they are all images of one person who had a deep impact on my life. In this way it will be more aesthetically pleasing and it will go more into depth about what I originally cared about for this project in the first place: my family and their lives and their impact on my existence and my memory.
Dawn also encouraged me to work with different tropes and visual styles such as repetition and cropping to create new and different ways to view each of my photographs. The tape transfer method is another such idea, which could be used as a different sort of way to view a photograph. So instead of creating a visual family tree and forcing my pictures into that particular frame or order, I am embracing the possible chaos of the images' deeper meanings and how they affect each other visually as well as with regard to memory. I feel that I have a lot more freedom now, and am more excited about the prospect of the final project because it will be an inherently more interesting project. I was forcing myself into boundaries I had created, and now they're gone! I'm excited to see what this project finally becomes.

Comments? Questions? Final Project

My project is about collective memory, specifically the collective memory of my family. It will take form reappropriated in the book "When We Were Very Young" by A. A. Milne, the man who created Winnie the Pooh. I chose this book because it was a very influential book in my childhood. My father used to read the poems aloud to us when we were little, and to this day I can remember many and even recite some of them. In this way the book plays into this idea of my family and its collective memory and significance.
Since my idea involves my family, and in many ways my family tree, I will put a family tree at the very beginning of the book with names of all the people I will include. I was originally going to try to create some sort of book that opened up into one big page in which the project was the family tree, but that would not fulfill the requirements of the project, as it is supposed to be between 10 and 20 pages. Instead, I will linearize the family tree, either starting with both sets of grandparents and moving into the two sides of the family with my immediate family at the end, or starting and ending with the two sets of grandparents with my immediate family in the middle.
The pictures of my immediate family will be different, however, in that each member will have a series of images instead of just one image, of different stages of their life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, present day - as they apply) emphasizing how our individual stories and memory have created who we are and contribute to the overall memory of the family. I may also make these pictures stand out even more by more clarity, or some kind of border, etc.
In this way, my book will be a physical representation of how my immediate family and the individual lives of each of its members has formed the collective memory of my overall family, then reaching out into my more distant relatives. Each of our stories has affected each other, and together they make up the collective memory that is my family.
I've emailed home for pictures since I won't be able to go there and get them myself (I'm from Massachusetts) and I am just waiting for my family to get on the ball and collect these photos so I can finally get more hands on with this project.
I do need help with how to put the pictures in this other book in such a way that it is both aesthetically pleasing and makes sense in there...I don't want to just paste pictures over words.
Thanks for the input!

A New Visual Memory

These two pictures are from the Useful Links website given us to help us with our artist books. The artist's name is Virgilio Ferreira and she is an example of an artist working with memory and the photograph. The artist's description of her work is this: "It is between opposite poles – logic and magic, the rationality and irrationality – that I intend to work. I consider that some of these images seem to relate to a seemingly obscure archive of our unconscious memories." The way that these pictures are created is by using a double exposure to overlap two moments in time in the same place. The overall effect is a very blurred and surreal representation of reality that does in fact seem to physically represent the way that many of our memories appear to us after the fact. These images are not particularly clear and neither are those images that we remember. In some ways though, these photographs remind me more of not-quite-remembered dreams rather than memories, because often memories actually are remembered as specific images rather than just blurred ones. Ferreira also states that "the presence of the two physical and chronological layers in the same image mesh into diaphanous lights and ethereal atmospheres; this visual effect contradicts the ordinary flow of perception." In this way she is dealing with the way we perceive ourselves and perceive memory but she manipulates the visual, changing it to something we don't quite actually remember. This gave me a new interesting way to think about memory visually. I really like these photographs.
On another note, these pictures are really interesting in the way the double image is displayed. I really enjoy the way the light filters through both of these pictures as well. There also almost appears to be a shadow person floating in the clouds in the second one.

Collective Memory and Photographs

For this week's blog, I decided it would be a good idea to peruse the Useful Links website for some kind of inspiration. One of the first links on that site is one for collective memory, which is, incidentally, what this week's reading was about. What I found was a collection of photographs of September 11-related images. There are some from before the attack, artistic pictures of the twin buildings, others during the crash, and some of the devastation left behind. These two particularly stood out to me. Barthes' darn punctum.

The first is much clearer and better depicts the wreckage from that day, but the second really speaks to me for some reason. The first is almost pretty in a weird way. It's very saturated, the colors are rather brilliant, and the image is very crisp, but the second to me better represents what actually happened. It is dark and morose and almost sort of forlorn...it seems more appropriate, if not as detailed.

I've never really thought about it before, what collections of photographs could mean to a group of strangers, particularly as a way to commemorate some sort of tragic event like this, as a way to remember it. As a way to never forget the horrors of that day, but also to bring people together. This site is a way for perfect strangers to post pictures of that day or something that reminds them of the event, alongside others that were affected by it. This act not only binds people together because of the commonality between them that it obviously creates and demonstrates, but the photos themselves create this collective memory that others like myself can stumble upon and discover and become a part of ourselves. I can really see now how this sort of collective project could create memories, locked forever in these photographs.

What was particularly interesting for me when looking through this collection of memories was to think about how that day has affected me. It's kinda bizarre to think about, because I was so young when the actual event took place that it did not gain the proper importance until several years later, when I became old enough to realize the affect this attack had on the United States and on the world. It's so strange to think about being alive when it happened but not being able to understand it yet. Now that I can, pages and archives like this one seem more important to me.

http://911digitalarchive.org/galleries.php?collection_id=26&page=1
Just in case anyone else wants it ^