me and my memories

 

“The self is a storage and retrieval system, a repository of the roles we have in the world as, say, the perfect mother, ardent lover, reliable bureaucrat, brilliant doctor and so on.” (Finkelstein, p138).

     The subject of my final project is “me and my memories”. The contents of my project are photos. I took a recent photo for myself, cut it and put it in the middle of the sheet. I collected photos for me throughout previous periods of my life, scanned them, cropped them, printed them and cut them in circles through marking them with pencil using cocoa cap and stuck them around my recent photo. The resolution of the old photos is not good since they were taken by older versions of cameras compared to the recent one in the middle. I put the photos in chronological order starting from my early childhood to now passing through important events in my life. This project is categorized as a collage. I chose to do this because at the beginning, I intended to include photos for my family to illustrate the idea of family support inspired by Tom Nussbaum portrait that we saw during our visit to Montclair art museum and the portrait of Frida’s family in which she was in the middle and pictures of her family surrounding her, but I faced difficulties in collecting photos for my whole family especially that many important family members for me are dead now. So that, I decided to choose my photos which connect me to them. For example, most of my childhood photos were taken by my uncle who was a special person for me. I loved him so much and sometimes I was calling him Dad. He suffered from cancer for few months and died when I was in high school. I still remember him when he was taking photos for me. He had no children, so he considered me as his child and he was fond of me. He had a great impact on my life. When I grew up, I fell in love with someone who took the picture in the top of the right side. I loved him so much and he did so, but we separated because he could not find a job and there was no money for marriage. The picture in the bottom of the right side is one of my wedding photos. I chose to marry my husband for many reasons rather than love. He was living in another city and to marry him I had to move and change my life to be with him. I felt at that moment that I am escaping from my memories that I did not like and forcing myself to forget them, but it is not true. I am still holding these memories inside my mind and they still come to me in my dreams to shape my days and my whole identity. I recognized that I would never be me without them in my life.

“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.”( Susan Sontag, On Photography).

I see that this final project is different from my midterm one in terms of the conceptual thinking. I moved from the area where I was comparing my present against my past to the area where I can find my identity. I moved to answer many questions like who am I? Who has influenced my life? Who connects me to my roots? What would I be without those people in my life? These questions are still hanging in my mind trying to find many answers that could be correct. These changes in my thinking occurred throughout the semester. Readings played an important role along with the professor who forced me to go out of my comfort zone and look outside the box. The story of the artists that we discussed influenced me. Each artist touched a specific area in my thinking because they all had something different to show through their artworks. Although I have no good skills for painting or drawing, I see that this class drove me towards creativity and critical thinking.

   The content we expose ourselves to on the media changes the way we think about ourselves and others. Young people are highly affected by the values presented by media. In effect, media offers numerous interpretations of what is beautiful, sexy, attractive, and appropriate. What we see, hear and learn shapes our personality and the way we think. A good evidence for that is the culture of different countries. What we know about our culture is basically inherited through media from generation to the generation and became part of our identity. Media plays an important and hidden role in our life. We get influenced by it without even notice that.

   "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”.(Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle). This quote for Debord describes my project. Spectacle must not be something we can see, it can be something we can relate to such as important people or places that build up our memories and construct our identity. Images are subjects that can be visualized, but they mean nothing for persons who do not know the hidden story behind them. Every image is an evidence about social relation among people. The difference between two persons who look at the same image and interpret it differently is the knowledge. Knowledge can make things valuable. The difference between me looking at my photos and anyone else is my knowledge about them.
"The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished." (Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle). My life between the past and the present will never be reunited. I will never go back to be a kid or a teenager, but my life is a one unit in my mind carrying my memories and shaping my identity.
The relationship between my photos and my identity is the spectacle that few people can see it. My project tells a story about me that is exists in the spectacle as long as I am still alive. It can be also a memory for someone else such as my children. Our past became a memory and our present will become a memory maybe for us if we still alive or for people who love and surround us after we pass away.
References:

Finkelstein, Joanne. The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture. Tauris, 2007.

Sontag, Susan. "On Photography ." www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml.