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.