Final Proposal

• Photography in search of self→ “the camera gives you the license to strip away what you want people to know about you to reveal what you can’t hide” (Genius of Photography: We Are Family)

• Use photography as a way of living the moment without worrying about forgetting it → “be there and get lost at the same time” (also from Genius Of Photography: We Are Family)


I think I’d like to focus on people for my final project. The two quotes from the Genius of Photography series I have included above are intriguing to me, and since I do not normally like to photograph people (nor do I feel particularly good at doing so). Now, I’d like to challenge myself to do some sort of work with portraiture, and use photography as a way of making a comment on how photography has become a way to display to the world a certain “pre-packaged self”, as many celebrities and the like have done. I want to experiment with how photography deals with truth of identity, display of identity, and perception of identity.

I don’t have much planned out yet, although I do know that I’d like to work with text and image (oh my!) – I have in my head a vision of the final presentation of my project: I see some sort of a series of portrait-esque images of a person, or an interaction involving more than one person….paired with a bit of text that will tell some sort of story about the person(s)……These will both displayed in the same area, so that the viewer can interact with them simultaneously. In doing so, I hope to make a comment on how we process and integrate stories told by the written (or spoken) word compared to how we process visual images and translate them into stories/narratives – and then use this to speak to how both of these can deal with different ideas of identity.

So, for this project, I am going to be relatively experimental (dealing with people, dealing with text and image) – whether or not I will end up with a successful work by the end, I am unsure. Is this too ambitious?