Final Project Idea

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…

This Week's Blog

This is a picture of Martina, the little six-year-old girl whose au pair I was when I lived abroad in Spain during the year I took off between high school and college. This was one of the most important times in my life (as of yet), so any picture from that time speaks to me and fills me with a plethora of memories of the several months I spent as part of this little girl’s family. The story behind this particular photograph is that I was taking pictures of the house I was staying in so as to be able to remember it later (although now I wonder if pictures help me to remember or if they alter my memory – thanks to this class), and Martina absolutely loved photographs and being in them. She kept leaping into the frame as I was attempting to photograph her house. This behavior was indicative of her personality: her overall high-spirited energy, and her eagerness for my acceptance. You can just see her happiness and exuberance in her toothy smile. This photograph makes me smile every time I see it, and brings me back to a very remarkable time in my life, full of all sorts of strange and new experiences that challenged me in many ways. I’ll never forget the myriad of emotions this little girl made me feel. I also think it is interesting how there are other photographs captured in the background, black and white ones of famous actresses. Oddly enough, none of them are Hispanic, demonstrating the interest felt by this family for other cultures. Because they are a part of this photograph, somehow suddenly those other photographs apply to me in a way they never have before, simply because they were in a house where I lived, and in this photograph, and I find that kind of interesting.

Quick Question - Extra Blog courtesy of Memory Lucida

Roland Barthes has this picture in his book and claims that the punctum for him is not the overall affect of the picture, but instead the male child's bad teeth....I found this really bizarre...but perhaps I do not understand the picture. Why are the children smiling as if they are having a wonderful time if that boy has a gun to his head? And why is he holding the hand of whoever is pointing the gun? And why isn't Barthes outraged not at this child's teeth but at the seemingly sinister and weird story being told by this photograph. The only thing I can think is that the gun must be fake for these children to be so genuinely happy, but in the meantime, I am still confused! Is this a really well known photograph that everyone knows about and I am just undereducated and therefore horrified? At first glance this is certainly an appalling photograph...but why the joy on their young faces?

Extra Blog 3: Upon Finally Meeting My Mayflower Resident

I had a really interesting time at the Mayflower this week; I finally had a chance to meet my resident, Sylvia Reaves! Alexis and I had a chance to meet her husband the initial week, but only for about 10 minutes because they had been late due the helping out their children by doing some dogsitting for them. Needless to say, we were excited to actually spend time with both of them this week. Alexis and I are working on this project together because Shelby and Sylvia Reaves have decided to create one book or project between the two of them. They think that since they have spent so much of their lives together that it just does not make sense to try to create two separate books. I think this is very interesting because a friend of mine in our class (Jenny) said that her fellow, Bernie, said that he wanted to make a separate book for the very reason that he and his wife did everything else together. It is funny to see the different sort of responses we are getting to these projects.
Shelby and Sylvia have decided they want to do some kind of travel log with their project because they have traversed so much of the world; upon arriving at the Mayflower last week, Shelby handed us a copy of a detailed list of his travels and their dates. It is very impressive - he has been to a great plethora of countries, both of them have. They lived in Hong Kong for ten years and happened to raise their children there. Two of their sons graduated high school in Hong Kong. Their passion for travel is very obvious when seeing their quarters in the Mayflower. They were able to show us around last week and their room is absolutely amazing. Never have I ever seen so many different artifacts from different countries in a living space. And it is not just trinkets that they have lying around on top of their furniture, they have completely adopted the culture of living from Hong Kong - all of their furniture is actually from the country, and when I asked Sylvia if they had adopted the culture when living there, here reply was an emphatic, "yes!" I thought all of the apartment was absolutely beautiful, but one of the most interesting artifacts was the "pee lamp." Yes you heard me. I'm not sure exactly what happens, Shelby explained it well but the exact science is now eluding me. But basically they put something on it in a particular design, bury it in the ground, and pee on it every day for some months, and the nitrogen in the urine cuts away and creates a design on the metal, leaving an interesting green color and a really good story. I also loved Sylvia's collection of owls and elephants from many different countries. It is because of this impact of traveling on their lives that they have decided to depict the many places they have visited in their book and sort of tell the story of their lives in pictures for the project we are doing together. Their history is so interesting that I am really excited to actually get working on this project!

Extra Blog 2

So I know we are supposed to respond to our experiences at the Mayflower in these extra blogs, but, unfortunately, we did not go this week, and I also have not had the pleasure of meeting my partner at the Mayflower, Sylvia, so I would not really have anything to write about at this point in the process.

I will instead write about something I thought of this week about our use of photography as an inherently digital and technological generation. Our generation and/or young persons of our age rarely prints photographs at all, unless for a specific purpose such as a collage, or a photo book assigned by teachers for a class (per se), or the like. Instead of buying photo albums and laboriously spend hours putting pictures in a particular order in that album (something I always truly enjoyed as a child - it helped me better relive the experience, and in turn, I think, helped me better solidify the memories in my mind), we create digital albums on online sites or computer photo programs such as Facebook and iphoto. These programs take away the physical aspect of sorting and organizing photographs in any sort of actual book. Iphoto even organizes them for you, putting them in order of date and time. Heck, it even recognizes the faces of people in photographs and tells you who is in each picture. Facebook is similar, though instead of housing all of your pictures, there is some editing process in which we decide which pictures to post on the web, but this still results in an entirely digital and technological version of our memories and the many images we have capture.
Most of my childhood is laid out somewhere in actual physical photographs, many of which I put together myself, something I loved doing. The older I get, the more I put pictures on Facebook to create an album or share them rather than printing them out and creating a photo album. It is expensive to get pictures printed, especially when you can just post them for free. The more I create these Facebook and iphoto albums the more I think about how I will never be able to access these pictures, and in turn many of the memories that go along with them, when Facebook ceases to exist. Friends' pictures disappear when they delete their Facebook page, Facebook will eventually go out of style, or I will decide I am simply too old to be plastering the internet with all of my experiences and memories (I expect to grow out of Facebook in the not-so-distant future). What will be left them? When I am sixty years old and I want to look at pictures of my seemingly hapless and radiant youth, there will be only digital versions of my memories; there will be no physical representation of those photographs. This kindof scares me! I know that my memories and pictures probably won't be lost, in that harddrives do not tend to irreparably crash all that often, but I think there is something inherently sad in not being able to take out a photo album and sit down on the couch surrounded by family members and show off these pictures. I look at my facebook albums and feel that something is missing, that something has been lost in this transition from the actual photograph to the digital photograph. Plus, at this point, it would be very difficult to print out years worth of pictures and cry to create physical photo albums because of the vast number of pictures that have accumulated over the years. This feeling will merely intensify as I get older and have more pictures, it will not lessen. When I am old and I want to show my grandchildren what my life used to be like, how will I do that? I guess I might just be traditional in my views on this issue, but once Facebook no longer exists (something that is bound to happen), so many of my pictures or pictures I've been "tagged" in will cease to exist as well. How is the digital age prepared to deal with this? Just look at them on a computer? I do not know...but there is something missing from that, something important.

Extra Blog 1: My Response to the Mayflower

The pictures our teachers showed at the Mayflower this past week were particularly fascinating to me. It was very interesting to see how certain images have defined a generation. All of the residents of the Mayflower seemed to recognize every one of the images displayed, while I, as a younger person not alive at that time, knew fewer of them. However, there were several that seemed to sort of transcend the generation or age gap, in that we all recognized them. What was fascinating about this to me was how certain photographic images resonate so strongly throughout history, to the point that generations later, we still appreciate those particular images.
I have included this World War II image of Omaha Beach because it was the picture that stood out to me the most from the slideshow Dawn provided, not only because of its ability to transcend the generation gap that I just spoke of, but it was also particularly special because one of the members of the Mayflower had himself been at this scene as a Captain during World War II. Much of history is lost on the newer generations that were not there to witness what has occurred, but a photograph's ability to preserve memories forever in time, whether or not it is a true and full representation of the past or just one snapshot of one particular instance, is truly amazing. What affected me was being able to experience not just the photograph that already allows us to see a section of the past but the account of someone who had actually been there. It was very interesting to hear his memories of being in the very situation seen in the photograph above. Sometimes it is hard to gauge what exactly happened from a photograph, but that gentleman's account really brought the picture alive for me. It is instances like this that make me very excited to work with the folks at the Mayflower. Both generations can impart wisdom upon the other, as we help them create their time capsule or photo book and as they share the stories of their wondrous lives upon us younger folks. I am really looking forward to this project and learning new ways to view the world by exploring memory through use of the photograph.

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.