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.

Home

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/the-psychology-of-home-why-where-you-live-means-so-much/249800/

• Why home is important to us and how the concept of home is different throughout the world.

• Home as the body, how we own our bodies, how do we navigate “owning” our “home” with other people and in public space.

• The concept of “home” can be other people, how do relationships and connections shape what we define as home and how we live in our home spaces and non-home spaces.

• Family can be representative of home, for mothers, it is the literal home of the fetus, and the relationships and connections throughout life. Do our understandings of “home” through people/family and space differ?

• While students at Bowdoin, we are promised to be at home in all lands, what does that look like? How is that connected to “making home” during our four years at Bowdoin? Brunswick and Bowdoin as “home.”

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1889653?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

• The gendered dynamic of space, ownership, and body. The idea of “separate spheres” between men and women. How does that impact our use of space and sense of ownership? Is this reflected in photographs of men vs. women?

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/theliteratureofprescription/exhibitionAssets/digitalDocs/The-Yellow-Wall-Paper.pdf

• A short story depicting ideas of gender roles/norms in regards to physical space. Our spaces impact us and we impact our spaces.

• Walker’s book explores themes of individuality and independence, I like the idea of how our relationships with ourselves and ownership of our bodies and selves impacts how we move through the world and create relationships with others.

 

My photography project will explore themes of home, body, ownership, and space. What does it mean to “own” a space? Can we own spaces that are public, spaces that other people utilize as well? My project will look at how as a college student, I have made Bowdoin and Brunswick home and one of the spaces I have claimed ownership over public spaces. How do I see the use of “my” space by other people, strangers/other students/etc.? Can home be a place I don’t own, an object, other people? Do my body and the space it takes up create home and ownership? I want to see how body, space, and home intersect. The image is an interesting medium to explore these themes; can I capture these complex and moving concepts in a single frame or set of frames? In these images I want to see how light and time of day can impact the tone and meaning of the photographs. Thus far I have one space, a specific couch cushion in Little Dog Café, that I want to explore and photograph.

Influences for my self design:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/11/realestate/troubled-lefrak-city-turning-the-corner.html?pagewanted=all

This is an article that I read about my neighborhood and how it was perceived in 1984. It got me thinking about trends and changes in spaces and communities.

2. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/lefrak-city-queens-turns-50-article-1.1159198

Similarly, this is an article about when my neighborhood turned 50 years old and had a profile done on some familiar faces of Lefrak, which was the New York Daily News’ try at describing the community feel of the neighborhood.

3. Season 6, Episode 8 of Girls: Too Much History

In this episode I watched, Ray and Abigail go around interviewing people who have lived in Brooklyn and how they feel about the changes. In the context of the show, I have opinions of what they did but the idea of interviewing inspired me to have that portion in my self design. Below is a review of that episode.

http://www.vulture.com/2017/04/girls-recap-season-6-episode-8.html

4. I deactivated my facebook, and this boy probably deleted his status, but my friend john once wrote this status about how everything changes and you grow. That stuck with me and made me think about his growth specifically because he was one of those kids in my neighborhood that gave me such a hard time. What is it like to meet the people who made you feel like shit after a number of years have passed?

5. Number four brings up another question, which is how do you memorialize people who have now died that you didn’t really know, but represented something more? One of the biggest reasons why I feel the need to photograph my neighborhood is because I think there was a change after the murder of an old schoolmate of mine, Andrew. His death is, in some ways, one that I think is at the center of all these changes going on in the neighborhood. Weird to list death as an inspiration but I can flush this out if need be.

6. Gentrification. New York seems to be a hot city to list when the conversation of gentrification appears, but it is often talked about using Harlem or Williamsburg as the references when there are all these other places that are being gentrified that are not as popular but are well inundated with history and change.

7. Census Data on my neighborhood — specifically related to changes in race. This came mostly out of research I did last semester for a sociology paper on neighborhoods.

8. The movie Steve Jobs inspired my want to do the project in three different formats — film, digital, and polaroid. Danny Boyle does something similar too in the film where the movie is divided into three sections, each filmed differently to indicate the history of film technology. I love it! Not sure I loved the movie though, but that’s just an aside.