Sunday, August 29, 2010

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.

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