Photo Essay

My Project

Starting this photo essay required me to think on my feet. Literally, I spent a day walking around campus trying to come up with inspiration. My Muse finally revealed the everyday usage of traffic signs as conveyors of a semantic meaning. There was nothing deep about signs, parking meters or traffic signals. Out of the ordinary, I decided to create the extraordinary.

My original idea was to juxtapose an image of a sign with someone violating that regulation. However, it was hard to find a lot of unique regulatory signs and even harder to capture images of people actually violating them. I branched off the idea of everyday traffic laws and how normal it is for people to violate them. Then I explored the arena of human rights, and the photo essay had a more global meaning, but I kept the target audience directed at the individual and how each person impacts the world.

As I took photos of ways that people "violate" the law or the intended meaning of traffic or regulatory signs, I thought about how to tie in human rights. Instead of tying everything together, I decided to make the slideshow a "stream of consciousness" piece in which one image triggers a thought about another related but different image. I opened my gage to a variety of images that could eventually connected the photos in this order: speed limit sign, stop sign, no parking zone, a car violating the no parking zone, an expired parking meter with a car still parked there, traffic signal blinking with the "Don't Walk" sign, a kid crossing when the sign forbids that action, stolen shopping carts in front of a fraternity, a "NO DUMPING" sign, waste in a landfill, homeless people eating garbage, poverty in Africa, contrasting poverty with decadent bars of chocolate, slaves laboring on cocoa farms, slave with marks of floggings, a child soldier with a gun, a girl cowering in the shadow of fear, a ghost image taken of my friends and me, my senior graduation at church, college bible study, first front-page article, silly jumping picture where I stand out and finally a series of photos taken with a 2-year-old.

The beginning and ending are the most confusing because there seems to be no relationship. The first photo deviated far from the last photo in the slideshow. This was to show the movement of my thoughts that traveled from one image to the next. All the photos were indirectly interlinked. In the end, the message behind the whole piece was that I somehow impact the college community and the world. Who I am in the bare essence is similar to that of a child who doesn't know any better. I have stripped myself of any title, ranking or name by showing first my accomplishment of graduation and making a front page byline and showing the groups I associate myself with and then reverting to images of childhood pleasures - making silly faces at the camera and seeing the world with playful eyes as I once did as a child. These last three photos were taken multiple times in one setting to show that change happens every minute of our lives. It is important to value every moment. Moments are fleeting and never linger at the doorstep longer than the instantaneous zero (physics). Thus, people should tackle everyday experiences with full speed. Hence the first image of two men increasing the speed limit. Just as one realizes a frame of his or her life has passed, several more moments have fleeted while one was caught up in that one thought alone.


The difficulties with the photo essay were mostly mental. I didn't want to stretch myself to thin by going out to get all the photos because most were impossible to find. For instance, I wouldn't be able to take a picture of a slave, but I did want to put all my heart into this project. So I had to settle for using both photos I took myself and images on Google. I had trouble deciding which photo should lead and which photo would finish and leave a lasting impression. I experimented with the different settings to make the photos appear a certain style using photo editing techniques on Picasa. I ran into some trouble uploading and creating a slideshow on Flikr, so I made an account on Photobucket instead.

My major breakthroughs were the ways that I used lighting and blurred backgrounds to focus on certain aspects of a photo. That immediately caught my attention as I viewed the finished product. I was proud of the way I used color and different angles, too. What ended up happening was that I thought of the "stream of consciousness" manner of displaying the images while I was in the process of SEEING the slideshow.

As emphasized in the readings, I knew the importance of perspective and how my interpretation of this photo essay could be vastly different than the way my classmate may understand it. Since we focused on using just images as symbols, I had to eliminate the text that often could be used as a task force to help viewers see the literal and translate the underlying meaning of the object. For the most part, the readings taught me the importance of viewing the context that surrounds the objects and symbols. In photographs, it requires a stretch of imagination because one is viewing a two-dimensional surface without the actual sensory stimulus that a natural surrounding offers. That provides all the more reasons to realize that the author is making every effort to grasp the audience members and communicate with them through the image.

Overall, my theme is the interconnectedness between the individual and the world. Also, I tie in the idea that laws and rights govern the universe, yet people have little time to care or don't reason to act responsibly. I want to emphasize the ignorance of society and the apathy that hinges from simple cases such as violating traffic laws. Potentially, that carefree attitude leads to an even more defined apathy toward issues that demand our sympathy and support: the violation of human rights. Of course, this violation of human rights lies on the opposite end of the spectrum as stealing or crossing the street when forbidden. Yet, we respond to human life similarly to the way we react to regulatory signs. We simply deny that they exist in our minds, and our actions plainly prove that we aren't struck by them at all.