When I first took this picture, as I walked behind my children, I thought to myself, “There they go, walking away from me.” Emotions, according to Jonathan Turner (2002), are often mixed with each other and the result is not always as straightforward as it may seem at first glance. Happiness mixed with sadness will produce emotions like nostalgia, which is exactly what happened in this moment for me, when I felt both happy and sad to watch my children go (literally and figuratively). As we looked at this image together in class and as Gene talked about it, proposing for me to sift through my images looking for a pattern, I realized that I remember a few other pictures of my children walking together, which I took. I guess I like to capture moments of them walking, caught in an instant, taken without their awareness of it. I am intrigued by this idea and will go through my images to see if that could sum up to some kind of a project. I have already been quiet inspired by you all and am looking forward to seeing other images from the classmates who didn’t get to share on Wednesday.
Hi Anna:
Thanks for posting the image and the comment. Now you might want to start thinking about how collecting these images and organizing them will be different from just have a family picture album. What will make it spark a new way of understanding these images as maybe culturally significant, or if they give you insights into relationships and time/space that might not have occurred to you before. In terms of your project, you could have the images stand next to each other in different configurations. You could collage them together, cutting up copies of them and pasting them over each other in different ways to see what types of ideas that generates, you could write over the images and crop the images. You could paint over part of the images. You could do a voice over with the images. You could have your older son address them or the father of the children. You could investigate if these images are generic in a way that makes them merely sentimental (not sure the word “merely” belongs there). You could think about what you learn from walking with someone or behind someone that gives you a type of insight that otherwise you might not get, or what the image evokes that a textual description by itself cannot. I wonder if the readings by Eisner make you think about the purpose of these images in a way that you might not have done so before. Do the images illustrate what Turner discusses or do they do more than that?