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.