Inspiration

SD Proposal; Salam

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.

Self Designed Project Inspiration

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.

Anything But Photo

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.

 

Hugo Hentoff 7

For my final project I’d like to photograph the residents of senior centers in and near Brunswick. I want to get to know my subjects through the camera, but I also think that that is kind of impossible. I don’t want to pretend to be representing The Truth about life in a senior center or The True essence of my subjects, because I really don’t believe the camera can do that, even if it appears to be doing that. I want the photographs to be intimate and honest, but I also want to constantly remind the viewer that there is someone taking these photos, that this is not “real life captured;” this is a narrative I’m creating. I also don’t want the photographs to be exploitative or use tired tropes of what it means to be old. I want the personalities and humanities of the subjects to inform their representations, even if it just a representation and not the reality. Since I have not been to the senior centers yet there isn’t much more I can plan out because the location and the subjects will dictate exactly how I go about this.

 

  1. In Another Country by James Baldwin, the narrator talks about the process of writing a novel. He says that if the characters are only performing actions because the author decided they would do that, the novel is going to be unsuccessful. The characters must move and act on their own accord and the author has to be able to allow them to do that. If the characters are unique individuals, are humans, then they will do more than just move when the author tells them to. I want my final project to be informed by my subjects. I want to create representations based on their humanity, not my idea of what their humanity should look like.
  2. The Girls season finale represented motherhood and friendship in a way that felt intimate and completely true to the characters. It didn’t remind me of any other shows about motherhood or friendship I had ever seen, and it didn’t feel like it was informed by clichés about what being a mother is. I want to take this same attitude with me, the resistance to falling into tropes, into the senior centers.
  3. Billie Holiday’s All of Me is a tragic and beautiful and slow song that utilizes repetition and silence to evoke an emotional response in the listener. I want to create photographs that look like what this song sounds like.
  4. Louie C.K’s stand up specials deal with fatherhood and the experience of aging. It approaches these subjects in a heartfelt and unflinching way. He makes situations that might feel dark or scary funny, not by rejecting or ignoring the darkness, but by repurposing it.
  5. The Netflix British comedy Chewing Gum takes place in government owned and subsidized apartment building built for low-income residents. These tenements are often represented in popular culture as dark, dirty, and scary, but Chewing Gum makes the active choice to shoot using bright, vibrant colors, completing changing the representation through a solely aesthetic choice.
  6. George Saunders’s collection of short stories, The Tenth of December, uses stream of consciousness narratives that allow you to really get into the character’s head, even if you don’t want to be in there. I want to explore taking photographs that feel like reading stream of consciousness.
  7. The HBO series Veep is constantly referenced as the show that most accurately represents the experience of working in government. It does this because instead of focusing on large, dramatic plots, it focuses on the characters and the hilariously horrible things they do. Focusing on the often times cringe-inducing comedy allows Veep to create a representation that feels true to the real experience.
  8. Elizabeth Stout’s novel Olive Kitteridge centers around the life of a Maine woman whose gruffness and bluntness often leads to her being misunderstood and disliked. The novel explores aging intimately through the perspective of a uniquely recognizable individual, instead of using just what the author imagines aging to be.

Ben Painter 7

Project proposal-  I want to explore the relationship between the street photographer and her/his subject.  This will allow me to begin a project I will be working on all of next semester with Meghan Parsons and Mike. For this project, I imagine having two photographs go together, one a street photograph, and the other a photograph of the street photograph being made.  When I do street photography, I often feel like a hunter, like I am taking something from my subject.  It does not feel like a mutual interaction, or even an ethical one.  I hope to shed light on my concerns around the practice through this work.  For inspiration, I will be looking at texts, movies, and TV shows that explore ideas pertaining to the relationship between photographer, subject, and viewer; visual language of hunting/taking pictures of subjects; and the history/moral considerations of street photography.

Camera Lucida – Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida deals with themes surrounding the effect of being photographed on the subject.  Barthes describes being photographed as a certain form of death. This is a text that every photographer should know well. It is particularly applicable to this project, as it deals with the effect of a photograph on the subject specifically.

The man with a movie camera – Silent russian film released in 1929. One main “character” in this film is a man with a movie camera.  I have not seen it yet, but I have been told by a few film buffs that if I am dealing with the relationship between photographer and subject, this is a must watch.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2015/jul/31/man-with-a-movie-camera-video-review

Regarding the Pain of Others – I haven’t read this text yet, but Susan Sontag’s other work that I have read has been hugely influential to me.  This work deals with the ethical considerations surrounding photographs of suffering.  Will be relevant in thinking about the relationship b/w photographer, subject, and viewer.

Shooter (2007)- Hollywood movie about a sniper.  I will use this movies’ visual language around hunting humans in order to think about how I want to depict the “hunting” involved in street photography.

Blowup by Antonioni -”Blowup, or Blow-Up, is a 1966 British-Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni about a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, who believes he has unwittingly captured a murder on film” (wiki).  Another movie that I have been told is a must watch for what I am exploring.

The Wire- The wire has many scenes where the police take photos of people for evidence.  The cinematography of these scenes is particularly interesting. I will be able to draw upon this visual language in my work.

1984- George Orwell’s 1984 is a dystopian novel about the big brother state. This work is key to understanding one aspect of why most people are uncomfortable being photographed in public spaces.  Brings up themes of privacy, surveillance, etc.  Will be relevant to me as I am actually walking the streets photographing in public.

Nussenzweig v DiCorcia – “Philip-Lorca DiCorcia photographed Hasidic Jew Ermo Nussenzweig walking on a public street in New York without his knowledge or consent. DiCorcia sold 10 prints of the image for between $20,000 – $30,000 through the Pace/McGill gallery. Nussenzweig sued DiCorcia and the gallery for privacy and religious reasons.

The court ruled that the photograph was art, not commerce, and protected by the First Amendment.”  (https://petapixel.com/2014/10/28/8-legal-cases-every-photographer-know/)

This court case, and others like it, will help me navigate issues around street photography in general.  What do our laws say about the relationship between the street photographer and her/his subject?  What does that say about our society?

Construction Rough Draft