For the self designed project, I am looking to generate and curate a collection of images that explore womanhood, the claustrophobia of family, self-care/destruction, and the freedoms and challenges of living alone. I plan to incorporate images I have made throughout the semester of my room in Bowdoin and my family’s house in Georgia with street photographs, self-portraits, portraits of friends, and images that capture patterns of light I have noticed that appear through the screens in my windows.

I will be looking to the following non-photographic sources for inspiration:

1. Time Magazine articles about sleep/ other self-help/ informative health articles: I am interested in these articles to help me rethink my bed pictures and possibly create more images surrounding things we might tend to do that are detrimental to our health.
2. Concepts/ mental images from my biology classes: These concepts and images inform the way I formally construct images (depth of field, zoom, cropping etc.)
3. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri: I read this book in high school and it dealt with a lot of the cultural struggles children of immigrants in the US deal with. I am interested in creating images that deal with reconciling being American/Arab/Muslim in the US.
4. The Lobster (film): I saw this movie when it came out last summer and I was really interested in the social commentary it made about relationships, marriage, and the perceived worth/ self-worth of single people.
5. Pride and Prejudice (novel and film 2005): the story of a young woman in a large and somewhat overbearing family… I really like the idea of thinking about the ways in which Elizabeth Bennet was able to balance making/keeping her parents happy while also maintaining her individualism in a claustrophobic space.
6. Phenomenal Woman (Maya Angelou): The language in this poem is powerful and I have found that I get a different idea/ image out of it every single time I read it. I have found it both empowering and slightly troubling because I wonder how the poem might be different if she didn’t use references to the woman’s relationship with men as part of defining the “Phenomenal Woman”
7. The Color Purple: Another film that deals with what love looks like in a variety of contexts: family, marriage, friendship. This film also exemplifies some of my biggest fears surrounding romantic relationships/ marriage.
8. Downton Abbey: This TV show is brilliant and deals with a lot of themes around what it means to be a woman in a family as well as a society but also deals with managing and reconciling the our own desires with the desires that the people that love us have for us.