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.