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 ^

Why an English Major Would Love a Class on Memory and the Photograph

I’m an English major for many reasons. I love reading literature, writing, and discovering how others view the world. I am fascinated by the way humanity functions. I want to understand why people are the way that they are, and why they become who they become. The English major allows me to peruse and study and encounter the thoughts and perspectives of some of the greatest minds in human history. Each author has a different view of the world. Just as the eye is the window into the soul, I believe that the written word is the window into the soul of humanity. Our struggles, our passions, our failures, our successes, our outrageous and confusing and hypocritical complexities are all there on the pages of our literary history.
I think people are fascinating, and I like learning about how we work. In this way, everything we are reading in class about the way that human beings learn to remember and narrate who they are and who they become is very insightful. The article we read for class, “Narrative and Self, Myth and Memory: Emergence and the Cultural Self” by Katherine Nelson, was about the stages involved in how we learn to form our own self narrative, a story of memories that defines and creates who we are, and how able we are to remember that narrative, our autobiographical memory.
Something that really struck me as well was the excerpt we read of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. Proust approaches this subject of memory and how our minds work from a sort of English-majory perspective. His beautifully written work spoke to me because I saw some of myself in it; both in the way it is written and the way he demonstrated how his memory worked. He too formed his autobiographical memory in the way the articles we have read spoke of.

Fall Thoughts

This is, oddly enough, another picture from my time in Spain, but I chose to talk about this one for a different reason. Not because it reminds me of Spain, but because it reminds me of home. Here I am in Florida, this hot, humid, season-less state of sort of stagnant weather, while in my home state the weather has reached absolute perfection. I’m from Massachusetts, up in the Northeast where we are famous for the rich beauty of our autumn months. The days get crisp, tinted with a cold wind that smells like beauty and the sheer joy of the expressiveness of nature. The sun is hot for only a few hours a day, all the while that same wind tousles your hair and reminds you that it is worthwhile to be alive. The leaves change color, from green to yellow to orange to red, and as these changes manifest they fall to the ground as the blustery autumn winds give them new life, albeit short-lived, before they take their place on the ground where they crunch deliciously under children’s feet. I would love nothing more than to be at home right now, reveling in this distinctly and perfectly beautiful season that is my very favorite. This is all very poetic, but nature truly speaks to me, especially during this time of year. Why I moved to Florida, I’ll never know. I love it here, but I cannot help but miss every inkling of the weather back at home this time of year. Forget constant warmth and stagnancy; instead embrace the wild changing weather of the Northeast. There is something new every day, something beautiful every day. I am able to sometimes see that here as well, but fall break is making me terribly homesick, particularly because of the time of the year that it is.
Unfortunately, I am unable to go home this weekend for reasons that often strike me as silly, unfortunate, and infinitely frustrating – I don’t have the money.  Money seems to be the one constant in my existence, or rather, the lack of it. The idea that it is money that holds people (particularly young students in college) back just seems so wrong and so backwards to me. The younger generation is the future, and we need all the help we can get to succeed. And yet colleges all over the country cost more than I dare to imagine, and for whatever reason this country doesn’t feel the need to actually educate its young properly, in an affordable, successful way. Private colleges cripple young people for years and years after graduation. It simply does not make sense to me that a young person should be set up to experience the world by incurring tens of thousands of dollars worth in debt. What kind of life can possibly stem from those beginnings? But I am wayyy off track. I’m always intrigued by where my mind wanders when I just sit down and start writing the things I am thinking…
Moral of the story. I desperately miss fall and home and fires and delicious apple cider donuts, and America should pay for our education!
Thanks much.

Getting To Know Sylvia and Shelby Reaves

Upon beginning this project with the residents at the Mayflower, I was not sure what to expect. I did not know what to expect from my residents, from myself, how the project would take shape, etc. I thought it would be interesting but didn't really think about it beyond that. However, meeting Shelby and Sylvia Reaves has been a delightful and fascinating experience. They have lived such a full life together. It's a beautiful thing. Alexis and I went with them yesterday to their storage unit across town where they keep a myriad of tubs just full of photo albums full of pictures of their long, full life. Other's photographs don't often necessarily speak to a viewer, but I was absolutely fascinated by all of the pictures of the places they have been, and, now that I have gotten to know them better as people, I found myself being more and more interested in their personal photographs as well. Pictures of their grandchildren, for instance, are simply adorable. It has been really nice getting to know this couple with a completely different perspective on life. They have lived much of theirs already, they have seen the entire world (something I personally want to do, so I am very envious - this may explain why I am so interested in their photographs), they are happy to exist as they are.

These are just two pictures from their travels. I cannot remember where the first one is from, but the second is of a glacier in Alaska, a place I've always wanted to go, and something I have never seen before. They have hundreds of breathtaking photographs from all over the world; they lived in Hong Kong for a decade, raising their children there.
Looking at their pictures this past week, I felt a little bit like Barry Mauer and his found photographs. Obviously I know the Reaves and I know the pictures are of their family, but in a lot of ways I do not know much about their photographs - they did not tell me their entire life story - I had to make guesses about many photographs and what they meant or how important they were. In that way I felt like I was piecing together their whole life from this series of images, and that was very interesting for me. Like we always talk about, a picture is just one second in time, with a definite border and definition, and may not describe at all what the viewer thinks it does. However, with a lifetime of albums, you can still get a feel for what their existence was like. It is hard, though, to know the emotions of the individuals since many of the pictures are posed rather than candid. I'm rambling. The point is, their existence fascinates me, and I love being a part of their lives, even if it is for just a little while. They are very kind people, and I am glad to get to know them.

Final Project Idea

So I am not sure what exactly I want to do with this final project, but I do have this one idea that is starting to come together in my head. It seems a bit early for me to know exactly where I want to go with this…I do want to learn a little bit more about memory and the photograph (as the class progresses) before I make my final decision, but here goes.

The idea I have is a sort of family tree-esque idea, emphasizing memory specific to my family. For the book, I plan to appropriate some book from my home that has particular importance to me or to my family as a whole, or I may try to come up with some way to create a book that opens up to one large page that contains an actual family tree. If I decide not to do the latter, then it will not be a traditional family tree, but rather a regular book that just starts with my two sets of grandparents and continues through the generations in a more lateral way. I think with my immediate family, I will emphasize their existence in a more in depth manner in that I will put more photographs of them, in gradation, from infancy to adolescence, to adulthood, to old age (as they apply) and create a series of photographs for each of my closest family members. This would represent their greater affect on my immediate world and memory.

This series of pictures will demonstrate my whole family (well, three generations, probably ending with my own) and our connection to one another and imply the many memories that we have shared over the years, from one to another, from one generation to the next. Obviously it will just be pictures of the people, their face, and perhaps a bit of their personality, but each picture represents the entirety of that person: their life, their place in the world, their affect on it, and our affect upon each other. All of these lives put together in this book will manifest all of the memories my family has created, individually and together, represented through this familial set of photographs.

Obviously this is a way to represent a particular type of memory through photograph, rather than trying to represent what it means to represent or understand memory with a photograph, which is why I am unsure of my idea’s adequacy. Are we supposed to incorporate more specifics of the course into this, or is this idea enough? It seems to me very specific but certainly applicable to what the assignment calls for…

This Week's Blog

This is a picture of Martina, the little six-year-old girl whose au pair I was when I lived abroad in Spain during the year I took off between high school and college. This was one of the most important times in my life (as of yet), so any picture from that time speaks to me and fills me with a plethora of memories of the several months I spent as part of this little girl’s family. The story behind this particular photograph is that I was taking pictures of the house I was staying in so as to be able to remember it later (although now I wonder if pictures help me to remember or if they alter my memory – thanks to this class), and Martina absolutely loved photographs and being in them. She kept leaping into the frame as I was attempting to photograph her house. This behavior was indicative of her personality: her overall high-spirited energy, and her eagerness for my acceptance. You can just see her happiness and exuberance in her toothy smile. This photograph makes me smile every time I see it, and brings me back to a very remarkable time in my life, full of all sorts of strange and new experiences that challenged me in many ways. I’ll never forget the myriad of emotions this little girl made me feel. I also think it is interesting how there are other photographs captured in the background, black and white ones of famous actresses. Oddly enough, none of them are Hispanic, demonstrating the interest felt by this family for other cultures. Because they are a part of this photograph, somehow suddenly those other photographs apply to me in a way they never have before, simply because they were in a house where I lived, and in this photograph, and I find that kind of interesting.

Quick Question - Extra Blog courtesy of Memory Lucida

Roland Barthes has this picture in his book and claims that the punctum for him is not the overall affect of the picture, but instead the male child's bad teeth....I found this really bizarre...but perhaps I do not understand the picture. Why are the children smiling as if they are having a wonderful time if that boy has a gun to his head? And why is he holding the hand of whoever is pointing the gun? And why isn't Barthes outraged not at this child's teeth but at the seemingly sinister and weird story being told by this photograph. The only thing I can think is that the gun must be fake for these children to be so genuinely happy, but in the meantime, I am still confused! Is this a really well known photograph that everyone knows about and I am just undereducated and therefore horrified? At first glance this is certainly an appalling photograph...but why the joy on their young faces?

Extra Blog 3: Upon Finally Meeting My Mayflower Resident

I had a really interesting time at the Mayflower this week; I finally had a chance to meet my resident, Sylvia Reaves! Alexis and I had a chance to meet her husband the initial week, but only for about 10 minutes because they had been late due the helping out their children by doing some dogsitting for them. Needless to say, we were excited to actually spend time with both of them this week. Alexis and I are working on this project together because Shelby and Sylvia Reaves have decided to create one book or project between the two of them. They think that since they have spent so much of their lives together that it just does not make sense to try to create two separate books. I think this is very interesting because a friend of mine in our class (Jenny) said that her fellow, Bernie, said that he wanted to make a separate book for the very reason that he and his wife did everything else together. It is funny to see the different sort of responses we are getting to these projects.
Shelby and Sylvia have decided they want to do some kind of travel log with their project because they have traversed so much of the world; upon arriving at the Mayflower last week, Shelby handed us a copy of a detailed list of his travels and their dates. It is very impressive - he has been to a great plethora of countries, both of them have. They lived in Hong Kong for ten years and happened to raise their children there. Two of their sons graduated high school in Hong Kong. Their passion for travel is very obvious when seeing their quarters in the Mayflower. They were able to show us around last week and their room is absolutely amazing. Never have I ever seen so many different artifacts from different countries in a living space. And it is not just trinkets that they have lying around on top of their furniture, they have completely adopted the culture of living from Hong Kong - all of their furniture is actually from the country, and when I asked Sylvia if they had adopted the culture when living there, here reply was an emphatic, "yes!" I thought all of the apartment was absolutely beautiful, but one of the most interesting artifacts was the "pee lamp." Yes you heard me. I'm not sure exactly what happens, Shelby explained it well but the exact science is now eluding me. But basically they put something on it in a particular design, bury it in the ground, and pee on it every day for some months, and the nitrogen in the urine cuts away and creates a design on the metal, leaving an interesting green color and a really good story. I also loved Sylvia's collection of owls and elephants from many different countries. It is because of this impact of traveling on their lives that they have decided to depict the many places they have visited in their book and sort of tell the story of their lives in pictures for the project we are doing together. Their history is so interesting that I am really excited to actually get working on this project!

Extra Blog 2

So I know we are supposed to respond to our experiences at the Mayflower in these extra blogs, but, unfortunately, we did not go this week, and I also have not had the pleasure of meeting my partner at the Mayflower, Sylvia, so I would not really have anything to write about at this point in the process.

I will instead write about something I thought of this week about our use of photography as an inherently digital and technological generation. Our generation and/or young persons of our age rarely prints photographs at all, unless for a specific purpose such as a collage, or a photo book assigned by teachers for a class (per se), or the like. Instead of buying photo albums and laboriously spend hours putting pictures in a particular order in that album (something I always truly enjoyed as a child - it helped me better relive the experience, and in turn, I think, helped me better solidify the memories in my mind), we create digital albums on online sites or computer photo programs such as Facebook and iphoto. These programs take away the physical aspect of sorting and organizing photographs in any sort of actual book. Iphoto even organizes them for you, putting them in order of date and time. Heck, it even recognizes the faces of people in photographs and tells you who is in each picture. Facebook is similar, though instead of housing all of your pictures, there is some editing process in which we decide which pictures to post on the web, but this still results in an entirely digital and technological version of our memories and the many images we have capture.
Most of my childhood is laid out somewhere in actual physical photographs, many of which I put together myself, something I loved doing. The older I get, the more I put pictures on Facebook to create an album or share them rather than printing them out and creating a photo album. It is expensive to get pictures printed, especially when you can just post them for free. The more I create these Facebook and iphoto albums the more I think about how I will never be able to access these pictures, and in turn many of the memories that go along with them, when Facebook ceases to exist. Friends' pictures disappear when they delete their Facebook page, Facebook will eventually go out of style, or I will decide I am simply too old to be plastering the internet with all of my experiences and memories (I expect to grow out of Facebook in the not-so-distant future). What will be left them? When I am sixty years old and I want to look at pictures of my seemingly hapless and radiant youth, there will be only digital versions of my memories; there will be no physical representation of those photographs. This kindof scares me! I know that my memories and pictures probably won't be lost, in that harddrives do not tend to irreparably crash all that often, but I think there is something inherently sad in not being able to take out a photo album and sit down on the couch surrounded by family members and show off these pictures. I look at my facebook albums and feel that something is missing, that something has been lost in this transition from the actual photograph to the digital photograph. Plus, at this point, it would be very difficult to print out years worth of pictures and cry to create physical photo albums because of the vast number of pictures that have accumulated over the years. This feeling will merely intensify as I get older and have more pictures, it will not lessen. When I am old and I want to show my grandchildren what my life used to be like, how will I do that? I guess I might just be traditional in my views on this issue, but once Facebook no longer exists (something that is bound to happen), so many of my pictures or pictures I've been "tagged" in will cease to exist as well. How is the digital age prepared to deal with this? Just look at them on a computer? I do not know...but there is something missing from that, something important.

Extra Blog 1: My Response to the Mayflower

The pictures our teachers showed at the Mayflower this past week were particularly fascinating to me. It was very interesting to see how certain images have defined a generation. All of the residents of the Mayflower seemed to recognize every one of the images displayed, while I, as a younger person not alive at that time, knew fewer of them. However, there were several that seemed to sort of transcend the generation or age gap, in that we all recognized them. What was fascinating about this to me was how certain photographic images resonate so strongly throughout history, to the point that generations later, we still appreciate those particular images.
I have included this World War II image of Omaha Beach because it was the picture that stood out to me the most from the slideshow Dawn provided, not only because of its ability to transcend the generation gap that I just spoke of, but it was also particularly special because one of the members of the Mayflower had himself been at this scene as a Captain during World War II. Much of history is lost on the newer generations that were not there to witness what has occurred, but a photograph's ability to preserve memories forever in time, whether or not it is a true and full representation of the past or just one snapshot of one particular instance, is truly amazing. What affected me was being able to experience not just the photograph that already allows us to see a section of the past but the account of someone who had actually been there. It was very interesting to hear his memories of being in the very situation seen in the photograph above. Sometimes it is hard to gauge what exactly happened from a photograph, but that gentleman's account really brought the picture alive for me. It is instances like this that make me very excited to work with the folks at the Mayflower. Both generations can impart wisdom upon the other, as we help them create their time capsule or photo book and as they share the stories of their wondrous lives upon us younger folks. I am really looking forward to this project and learning new ways to view the world by exploring memory through use of the photograph.

Who You Are: My Mini-Photobook

Upon looking through the many hundreds of photographs stored on my computer's hard drive, I had a rather difficult time selecting a limited number of them to put in this photo book. How could I choose just a few photographs to describe an entire being, an entire life, in one little photo book? The more I looked through my pictures, however, the more I realized that the well known phrase, a picture is worth a thousand words, is absolutely true. I was amazed at the way different collections of pictures could so cogently create a cohesive representation of my life, of who and what is important to me, and who I believe myself to be in a way that pages and pages of words could never describe.

I do have a lot of pictures in my photo book, making it difficult at first to decide what I wanted their sequence to be. I spread them all out around me on the floor, surrounding myself in images of my life, of things and people that I loved, and I sort of moved the pictures around into the themes I saw before me there on the floor. The pictures are of me, my friends, my family, the places I love, the beauty of nature, the random thoughts in my head... From the many images and memories out on the floor before me, several themes presented themselves. I saw photographs that describe who I am, in my head and in actuality, photographs of those I hold most dear, photographs of places all over the world that I have been, and just silly pictures that manifest some quirky aspect of my personality. I have titled the final themes "Who You Are," "Where You Come From," "The Places You've Been," and "The People You Love." The images I have chosen I feel truly represent these four factions of existence. Four factions that I believe to be among the most important. Life is composed of ourselves, obviously, but also of the people we meet and the relationships we form; essentially, the memories we make. That is what we have to live with, our experiences that in turn become our memories. I think these four sections come together to portray in a very different, interesting, and effective way the things that matter most to me, and the images and memories that depict the person I am.

The "Who You Are" grouping are mostly pictures of yours truly, doing the things I love best, perhaps demonstrating a little too well my great affinity for nature; nearly every picture is me gazing out into the ocean or frolicking about in some other sense...I feel most like myself when I am a part of the natural world. These photographs demonstrate not only who I believe myself to be but also who I want myself to be. I look over the pages and am amazed at the way the images sort of effortlessly depict a little bit of the essence of my being. I guess I never thought a simple photo book project could make me think about myself so much and so thoroughly.

The first section means nothing without the support of the next three, because I would not be who I am were it not for the people I have known and the experiences I've had. This is especially true of those lovely people who raised me, accounting for the next section to be titled "Where You Came From." These, of course, are images of my family and our adventures. The last picture in that section is incidentally of the grandfather whose picture forms the first entry of this blog. He has aged some.

The next section is "The Places You've Been" because I believe that the different parts of the world that a person sees really affects that person and his or her outlook on life. My experiences elsewhere helped shape the knowledge I have of my home country (America), and certainly my knowledge of the rest of the world, and living abroad taught me much more about myself than I ever thought I could learn. The world is full of beauty, and I think everyone should have the chance to see it. Thus I have included pictures from all over the place because they have all contributed to my worldview and my perception of myself.

I titled the final section "The People You Love." It is these people who have helped me grow and learn and become who I am. Including photographs of them and myself and the experiences we have shared really lend themselves to accurately manifesting who I am. I feel that the whole book comes together to form, as I said before, a cohesive, if not entirely complete, representation of me.

As a general rule, I tried to add a little artistic touch to the whole book, with the placing of the photographs, and matching the color schemes of the pages to those found in the pictures. This is also true of alignment and spacing. I am not sure how important that is but I think that in itself represents something about me. It is hard to explain the selection process of photographs because the ones I chose just sort of spoke to me, and became this work of art in front of my eyes. They go together for nearly intangible reasons; I feel like I could not quite express in words all of the little nuances and connections between them because to do so would be to explain in words the very essence of my being. The impossibility of this phenomenon is perhaps why we were assigned a photo book, not an essay. Overall I am really pleased with the outcome of the book and how I feel it represents me, and I really appreciate what these images mean and the memories I relive when looking at them.

My Thoughts On The Course So Far...

I am actually really excited at the prospect of taking this course; it may very well be the reason I have not yet dropped out of the honors program. I am very interested in both art and psychology, and as I am trying to graduate in three years, I have very little time to take extra courses for fun. This class certainly allows me to do that. I am reading things in these articles that it had never even occurred to me to think about, and I am fascinated by the way our brains work. I have only read a few articles on the subject so far, but each of them is very intriguing and allows me to think about subjects I have never been able to explore on previous occasions. At first I was not sure exactly what photography and memory had to do with each other, but on the first day it occurred to me that the two are actually rather obviously intertwined, especially considering how photographs can preserve memory in a certain way. Because the reading material is entirely new to me, I am fairly easily confused at times, but I trust that the more I read, the more readily I will understand. I really enjoyed the Proust article, partially because I could understand it easily, and partially because it was fascinating how he was able to discover so much about the human mind and how memory works just by spending time alone, really paying attention to his thoughts and his senses. The mini photo project, too, though perhaps a bit daunting because it is right off the bat, is getting my creative juices going in a way I did not expect inititally. I feel I will be challenged in the best sort of way in this class.
As to my soon-to-be-had interactions with the clients at the Mayflower, I am really excited about that as well. Older people tend to respond well to young ones and I have always had good experiences with the elderly, and I feel I can relate to them fairly well, despite our age differences. My mother is a pastor, and her church is almost entirely full of elderly folks, and they are some of the lovliest people I know. In addition to this, this course will be entirely different from any I've ever had before, because it is a CE course and much of it takes place off campus.
I am looking forward to all of these things, but am a smidge nervous as well, simply because my honors courses thus far have been the hardest I've taken (naturally), and with all the work the students at Rollins get in a semester, this can be a bit overwhelming at the beginning of the semester, but I think the experience will be a good one overall. This course makes me want to be in the honors program and I am understanding better how interdisciplinary courses like this can be very well done. That is very exciting for me.
So yeah, I'm pumped! A little nervous, but pumped! :)

Day 1

We were asked today in class to choose one photo that we had on our person that described us in some way as an exercise to show us a little of what the course was about and also to prepare us for our project due the following class. I, having only my shabby LG cell phone and my license on my person from which to choose some self-defining photograph, chose this one. It is a black and white photograph of my Grandfather as a college student among friends.
This summer my family and I went to Wooster, Ohio, my father's homeland, for my grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary. There was on display a bulletin board of old photographs of my grandparents and their children and even their children's children. This particular photograph immediately struck me both because of its visual appeal and because it gave me, for the very first time, a glimpse of the life that my grandfather lived. It gave an aged man I barely know a distinct personality, and showed me a window into his past and into the rather full life he has lived. This photograph portrays a very dapper, even dashing gentleman at the height of his youth, with the world at his feet. A person I have only ever viewed in one light suddenly had much more depth than I had ever given him credit for. I think this photograph is just fantastic.
This all has to do with me in that the whole experience in Ohio, epitomized by this photograph, demonstrated on a much more personal level the family from which I have come. I saw more of the people that raised my father and could understand him better, and in turn am able to better comprehend myself and the way I view the world. The fact that this photograph opened that up for me is, I believe, important within itself. Perhaps I need to pay better attention to the world around me, and think more about from whence I came, and maybe get to know my own grandchildren one day, in a way that my grandfather never did with me.