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…
I think you're onto something here - I immediately started visualizing what the experience of interacting with your book would be like. I encourage you to continue thinking about the possibility of using an alternative approach to the standard way we make our way through a book (front cover to back). I love the idea of the middle of the book being the primary focus, and having the content then blend to the left and the right, using the motif of the family tree.
ReplyDeleteI think you could also think creatively about the formal qualities and aesthetics of the images in terms of their clarity and differentiation in size to help emphasize your points.
Your approach indeed sounds valid in terms of addressing the course's content.