Ingredients for life?

Grocery stores tell us we need water.

They tell us we need "organic" apples...

and expensive cheeses.

Nourishment. Right?

They tell us we need to buy cards... "Think about it. Why do people buy cards? It's not because they want to say how they feel. People buy cards because they can't say how they feel or are afraid to. And we provide the service that let's them off the hook. You know what? I say to hell with it. Let's level with America. Or at least let them speak for themselves. Right?"

Sometimes life is choosing a box of cereal. Or, sometimes life is choosing a box of cereal because it is called 'Life'.

This sequence “represents our culture in America. The essay conveys the process of generalization that we saw in Ansky's work. The photos show the particular aspects of our normal grocery routine, but also, represent our whole culture in America” (quote from Kelsey’s comment). I really liked this project because I was able to let go of my control on my images. When it comes to photography, I have learned that, ultimately, the meaning is up to the interpretation of the viewer. I can try to convey a message all I want with seven images… but, each individual is going to have a different view. Some people sort-of understood what I was trying to say and some didn’t. I really wanted to highlight commercialism in America and beg the question “Why do we need a store to tell us what we need? Just, why?”.  Many people understood that I wanted the images to seem like a daze but I wanted to do that in order to suggest a hypnosis we go under in such a store. Groceries stores are full of advertisements- to the point where it is overwhelming and puts us in a trance. 

 Anyway, I learned why Jean Muhr was so controlling over the meaning of his photographs. They were his and he didn’t want anyone to interpret them incorrectly. I realized this during the comment stage of this project and once I saw how creative and unique each comment was, I backed off. I began to understand what Muhr couldn’t… everyone is going to see a photographic essay differently, no matter what. I liked that some people saw it as a simple grocery list, some saw it as a metaphor for sleepwalking, and some saw it as a Garden of Eden post-Adam and Eve. All of these interpretations are equally valid because, honestly, that is what will stay with each individual. However, it just wasn't what I thought of when I put this sequence together.

One last thing I need to highlight is the image of the sympathy cards. I wanted this to be the climax of the sequence and not many, if any, saw that as it. I'm questioning grocery stores in this sequence with the ultimate image being that of cards. Why do we need a store to tell us how sorry we feel for someone? Why do we need words of sympathy commercially created for us? And, why are the sympathy cards so close to the birthday cards?

Hannah Moskowitz--Essay in Photographs

Body of Work

1994

                                                                        1995


                                                         
                                                               2011

     fixed reborn shrunk reclaimed

                                                            fixed reborn shrunk reclaimed



                                             I was five inches taller and twenty pounds lighter and standing next to my sister made me love myself.



                                I was two years younger and half an inch shorter and standing next to my sister made me feel like nothing could touch me.



                                                              1998

                                                             2012


 
                                                               whenever.


--

When we talked about Barthes, a sentence that ended up double-underlined and starred in my notes was, "Photography is the truth that proves history." No statement about photography so far has connected with my relationship with photography prior to this class quite this powerfully. I distinctly remember, as a chubby pre-teen, asking my mother when I'd stopped being skinny. She pulled out a series of pictures (one of which is included in the essay--my sister and I in bathing suits when I'm around seven) and said, "See? You were never skinny."

I was also interested here in the concept as photography implying the death of the subject, and one of the ideas I wanted to explore here was that the versions of me and my sister present in each picture no longer exist. Each iteration of the two of us exists once, which is fitting with the way that our bodies are constantly changing with regards to each other's. In the earlier pictures, we're very nearly the same height, but I became taller--an bigger--than her at a very young age. And those were our roles. We didn't ever see ourselves as things that would change. If nothing else, this essay means to show the death of that complacency.

Most everyone touched on the idea of my sister and me as a dichotomy, but not as many comments specifically mentioned the idea of body image or weight loss or eating disorders or sexuality, which surprised me. So I titled the essay Body of Work to draw attention to the fact that I did intend for this to be an essay about bodies and the way they are created, altered, compared, and deconstructed. The last photograph works as my conclusion here; I actually took this picture to give to a group of girls for them to guess what I weighed. I was asking my body to be named by the viewers of a photograph. I was asking them to assign a caption to this photograph the same way my mother did the picture of the seven-year-old in her bathing suit.

Daune O'Brien Photo Essay Assignment

"How little we know them," indeed. 

It is the space between where my mothering ends and their wonder of the world begins.

For as much as each child depends upon the presence of my life, there are moments in the midst of my presence that I feel their absence. 

There is something about sharing a birthday with two other family members. For as much as they have shared since the tiny beginnings of their lives, still...there is a space between. A space between where their unit ends and their individuality begin.  

And I watch from afar. I follow dark shadows and footprints and bent knees to places that I know they must go alone. The space between where their role in my life ends and their role in their own life begins. 

The photographs don't represent memories as much as they represent an acknowledgement...an acceptance. Or perhaps, a certain respect. 

Hush....I say to myself. Shhhh. I filter out the noise, the excess, the unimportant pollution that distracts me from seeing that space. That space in between where she clings and lets go. The space where I don't exist because in that moment she is far far away...

The world carries them away. This I know. This I resist. This moment I freeze and negotiate and beg to slow, or simmer, or rewind. 

But I can't compete with the grand world. It laps them up and lulls them with dreams and promises full of magic and wonder.

I follow. I watch. I listen. 

I protect. And cheer.
I rally.

All the while I know that the beauty lies in their ability to fly away...to become who it is they are destined to become. Who they are beyond me.

 Fly, I whisper. But not just yet.

Where are you, I wonder. Is momma there?

Where are you going, I wonder? Is momma there?

He is lost in color and sparkles and fantastic imagination. I am there but he lost in the sky.

I can touch her shoulder, or her hair, or the grain of sand on her toe. But I have no idea where she is this very moment. She is floating along the sea, counting feathers...She is building castles made of white glittery sand. 

"How little we know them," indeed. They are making their own way and choosing their own paths.
I trace their footprints with my mind, knowing I cannot follow.

I observe these moments that I am no longer a part...

They are immersed in a world that I simply witness from the sidelines of motherhood.

Something catches his eye, sparks a thought, turns out an idea, summons a fear....

The tide comes in and out. They are near and far. They are everywhere and nowhere. 

Oh how I wish the lens would capture and close the space. The space in between where I end, and they begin.

The space in between me and their world grows larger and wider and taller. 

But I believe that it is in that space...the space between holding on and letting go...

that they will truly find each other.

In my photo essay, "The Space Between," I attempted to convey the irony and conflict that exists between the enormous responsibility of caring for a child (and in my case, 5 children) and the reality of their impenetrable separateness. Much to our paternal dismay, we are made vulnerable by their individuality. And despite our longing to grow, nurture, and plant them in the world, we are all at once in disbelief that as their life-giver, we are somehow left out of the softest, sweetest---perhaps significant utterances within their mysterious lives. We can't always hear what the world is saying to them. How can that be? 

To further complicate my own story, my middle triplet (pictured in the tree and the canon camera lens) has Aspergers Syndrome which often makes the space between my world and his feel exponentially wide. His is the only front facing photo and although you can't make out the features, his climbing up and away instead of out and away (like the other children are pictured) represents his unique way of thinking---his life on his terms.

As a whole, I feel like my project differed from those we have discussed in class in that the pictures I selected were taken randomly over a period of time and not taken specifically for any such project. In other words, it wasn't until I began searching through hundreds of photos that I was able to feel the punctum. There is no doubt that my subconscious resistance to the awareness of my threatened maternal role was a factor each and every time I selected to capture an image. I realize that now. There is no doubt that my choice to edit my photos enabled me to filter out noise and center on that which I was simultaneously trying to resist and square away. The narrative I was telling was directed to myself, that part of the self which wanted to make sense of the feelings swirling around the evolution of roles and identities and realities. The shifting of the spaces. I often say to my children (in the privacy of my head), "oh, if I could write you..." And then I snap a photo and I bring out the finest point, and write to them, about them, with them--through that photo.  The color, the style, the artistry is a way to let the rest fall away and focus on the poems that they are to me.

Crossing (photo essay by Bruria Hammer-Bleich)

“The photographic essay . . . give[s] us a literal conjunction of photographs and text– usually united by a documentary purpose . . .” (Mitchell 285).

In taking and arranging these photos, I was particularly drawn to Mitchell’s explanation of the photo essay as documentation. After being hit by a car on campus at the beginning of the semester, I was repeatedly asked, “What happened?”  The medics wanted to know, the police wanted to know, the family wanted to know. In the accident’s after-shock I needed to tell the story as much as the circle around me was curious to hear it. But each articulation distorted the story a little, shifted my memory until I did not trust myself to accurately convey my own experience. Unlike the fickle verbal account, the photographic record is immutable. Just as Mitchell argues, photography succeeds as a reliable documentation of the crash where no other recreation – not verbalizing, not showing my already deceptively healed body – can reach the same honesty of explanation.

The first and fourth photographs (the empty crosswalk and the blood splattered curb, respectively), evoke Barthes’s concept of “stadium.” They are the expected plot points, with predictable, accessible interpretation. The cultural need for dramatic narrative, from an ordinary start with a regular crossing to the exhilarating end with blood across the ground, are satisfied in these two. Daune mentioned a narrative of betrayal in the essay “the bold thick white dashes laid out in front of you outline a space designed to protect you and just moments later deceives its protective capabilities.” Photos one and four represent either end of this betrayal, with the perspective in the first still trusting of traffic law that ostensibly protect us, and the fourth photo a burst lip after the realization that arbitrary governance means little to a driver distracted.

Taking the second photograph (car speeding towards the crosswalk) reminded me of the observation in Another Way of Telling that photographs rely on only the single artistic choice of when to shoot and that their resulting pictures are  “therefore weak in intentionality” (Berger 90). According to police and witnesses, the reason I was hit had nothing to do with the way I was crossing, only with the way the driver who hit me was driving. Similarly, the attempts at photographing a car speeding into the crosswalk was entirely outside of my control. I had to wait, over and over and over, until a car that looked like the car that hit me came at the right distance at the right speed into the crosswalk. The reliance on random passerby traffic for my image undermines the ideal of the artist in charge of her creation.

For Barthes, “punctum” is significant because any person can look at any photograph and leave with a different trigger within the image that pierced them. But I wanted the third photograph (the image of the blurred tree) to have only one punctum. I retook the photograph until birds and sunlight and passing helicopters were all safely out of the frame, minimizing distractions from what the punctum is to me – the blur of the leaves against the sky. Dr. Jelen noticed that the image is an attempt at re-enactment of the accident, a return to the moment in which the force of the car flung me to the air, and I glimpsed a blurred sky and thought it would be the last thing I would see. To construct the photo so there can only be a single punctum is an imposition far beyond the bounds of what Barthes would consider appropriate; for the photographer to claim what the punctum has to be to the viewers would be a gross overstepping to him. But I took the photo anyway so that there is only the sky to see, and only the leaves to leave bruised by.

Will and Hannah commented on back shadowing in the essay. The impending doom of the first images has been realized by the last, an “image text.” For Mitchell, the connection between photo and written word is absolute but abstract; every photo has a written narrative and every written narrative an inescapable visual aspect too. But the montaged text of the police report is a literal containment of writing in photo. The report signals the realization of the essay’s earlier premonition, but also teases it – if the crash victim survived healthy enough to leave a recording of her story then what evidence remains of her trauma?