Amanda’s Reflections on 2.26
Reading Luttrell’s pieces this week I was struck by how much information a self portrait or portrait can hold. Particularly when the person is talking back to a cultural narrative about who they are and what their experiences mean. I really enjoyed how she brought in the actual conversations along with the visuals in Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds. It really helped me understand the collective process of inquiry that grounded her research. If anything, there were points where I wished she had brought in more of what she and the students had talked about, and I wondered if she had shared some of her overall reflections with them and whether they had had a chance to give her their interpretation. For example, when she described that the students’ depictions of romance allowed for more of their nuanced and complicated emotions than their idealized depictions of motherhood, I felt she may have been missing something here. In the comments some of the young women made about always being there for their kids, I saw a recognition of the value of that kind of support, perhaps born out of struggle. There are many interpretations, but in many of the places where she related some of the specifics of their classroom experiences to theoretical work I wished there was more of a voice from the students.
Still, much of what she wrote was powerful to me. I decided this week to look back at Nancy Borowick’s photography, the young woman who lost both her parents to cancer. I wanted to see what portraits can say in the context and themes I’m exploring. I found a great picture below she took of her mom. In this photo, I see slowness and humor in the midst of cultural narratives of fear. I see someone being really unique in the midst of cultural narratives that others people who are sick.
As I reflected more this week on my project, I continued thinking about how I might use lines to explore my experience of finding, loosing, finding again connection in loss. I thought about what material would these lines be. Would they be a significant fabric to me, something I chose because of its aesthetics or something that is perhaps just plain white? Would I write something on these lines? I thought of perhaps writing questions I’ve been asking myself throughout our class as I’ve looked at these photographs. I also thought of writing different significant pieces of my life story and my family’s life story and intertwining them. Visually representing the ways in which we take on each other’s stories, how the stories continue and change through the generations, what it means to shift from hearing stories to telling the stories. I thought I could also play with the fabric itself (fraying, weaving it, etc) to express more about the experience of seeking roots and connection in loss. I wondered if I would want the fabric to loop around something, climb up something, and if it would make an overall design or not.
Hi Amanda:
First, I love the way you are thinking about your own project, the interweaving of telling stories and listening to them, what it means to have deep roots and yet feel loss, the posing of questions that might draw in others. Fabric is visual and textual, and thinking about how you can shape the fabric and color it to align (or not purposefully not align) with the text you are thinking of incorporating is a rich way to approach your project. It’s interesting to me how the thinking about visual methods to use is also transforming aspects of what you want to convey – fraying, weaving, intertwining are all adjectives that speak to experience as well as to conveying experience. I wonder if next week (a week from Wednesday) you could bring in some examples of some visual experiments thereby manifesting the conceptual. We could all discuss.
I thought your comments about Wendy’s visual ethnographic work were really interesting as well, but I won’t comment on them here. Your questions, however, were good ones to pose to her. The interrelationship between student voice and researcher voice is always a difficult one to navigate, and student self-representation is probably mediated by the very fact that the researcher is there.
I loved the photo you included in your post. What is the mom’s relationship to death and dying, and how is she joining with her daughter in making death less foreboding? Who designed the photograph? Was the mother acting in Borowick’s play or co-directing it with her? And the rest of that room is really interesting too.
Thanks for the feedback! I would like to bring something in the week you suggested. I was starting to think about material I might use. Perhaps a shirt I own, because what I am expressing is so much about identity changing, it could be interesting to tear up something I have worn (also you may know that in Judaism you tear a shirt when a loved one dies as the sound and act of tearing symbolize grief). I would probably also bring in some fabric that I thought would be good for this project but isn’t clothes.