History changes and challenges...

The way I see it, or at least understood from the textbook, is that important moments are those that change history forever. As I say history, I mean more than what is recorded in books. I am also including individual lives. The biggest example in the book was September 11. It is true that was the moment in history that defined out generation. If we go by the definition implied in this particular event, it means that we see important moments as those moments that unite communities, countries, nations and even the whole world. That union may be an union of fraternity or an union for vengeance. This was a moment that surely seemed to have touched every individual in the United States, and many others around the world. What made it important? We did. Our sorrow. Our fear. Our outrage. Our need for payback. Our unity. Our forgiveness. Our families. And many other things. The experience of James Nachtwey, in particular, demonstrates what a close viewer experienced that day. His experience is the one of someone that has experience the distress of. He was able to give us an insight and comparison between war and the even in Manhattan on that September day. This kind of events are important because they define generations, and we see them as things that impact, change, array, destroy, or compose the world as we knew it.
I also mentioned that history also refers to individuals. Susan Sontag is the one that describe it the best as she mentions that, " the wedding photograph has been as much part of the ceremony as the prescribed verbal formulas." In other words, the pictures of a wedding are as important as the vows themselves. I never thought about it, but it is true. Why? Because we want to keep a record of something that changes our history. No matter what it is. We take a million pictures during a trip, and then have the urge to make them public. It's our history. It's what is happening to us. It's how we are changing. I think that is how we see important moments. We measure them by how much our individual or global histories are affected by them.
My important moments are also pretty much defined by the paragraphs above. I think that what I consider important are those moments that I will remember for the rest of my life. Everything else is just an experience, but not quite a 'moment.' Important moments do not have to directly change my life. When the life of people I love change, I also consider them important moments. Now, there should be a rule for important moments to always have a good outcome. They would not have to be pleasurable like Fish Cheeks. She hated the moment, but she cherished it because of a good outcome. BUT, there is no such rule, and it never will. Moving on, a lot of people think that trying to capture a moment actually ruins the moment. I believe the opposite. I don't trust my mind. We are human, and it is in our nature to forget. I rather take some time away form the moment to have it with me the rest of my life.
Moving on again. Now to other topics. Challenging images. What is a challenging image? A challenging image is, for what I got from the book, those that make us think. The book says, "challenging images requires deliberate intellectual activity and highlights the contested nature of that thinking and writing." The way I understand is that they basically make our brain work. I don't think that it is much that challenging images do not agree with our believes. It is more than they represent a believe that we may not be acquainted with. I think that when I see something that makes me pay attention to it for more than 10 second, it is challenging. It has to do with the design, as the book suggests. I ask myself a lot of questions. I think the first one I ask is "Why would they create an image like that?" I just want to know why. Let say per se, that I see an image that offends the LDS Church. I am LDS, and before being offended I would ask myself why the would make something like that. What is the reasoning behind it? What is the purpose? Well, actually I may ask first if I agree or not. I am not sure which one I would ask first, but it would be one of them and the other one right after. I have to be honest. I am not sure what I would do after finding the answer to my two initial questions. I guess that if the image changed something in me, I may act upon, or not. Who knows? Give me a challenging image, and we can find out.

The Value of Face

I vividly remember the first time I saw The Afghan Girl. I was in my Western Hemisphere class in middle school, shuffling through the pages of ancient, mauled National Geographic magazines. Her eyes leaped out at me. Pain, saddness, anger, fear, it was all screaming off the page, pleading. When I opened Seeing and Writing 3 to Sharbat Gula's photo, I froze once more. My thoughts were like what Dorothy Allison said in her essay This is Our World, "If I sit with this image long enough, this story, I have the hope of understanding something I did not understand before. And that, too, is art, the best art." I just sat, waiting for her story to seep out and fill me, waiting to begin to comprehend. I feel like that's how stories are though. Everyday you go about your business, and one day the story finds you. Whether it be through photographs, friendships, nature, or art, the story finds you and fills you, it wraps you up and consumes your thoughts.

On another note, I really enjoyed Dorothy Allison's essay This is Our World. I referenced it earlier but it deserves more notice. Allison writes of how art is akin to a Rorschach test, acting as a "projective hologram of our secret lives." I know this to be true in my own life, having spent many years hiding behind the general opinions of others, fearing that my own opinions would act like a window to my innermost thoughts and dreams. Allison's essay surprised me. I did not expect to learn something about myself by reading about someone else. One sentence in particular haunts me, "I know I am not supposed to mention what I see." It has made me question how much I cover up and hide away deep inside. It has made me wonder what exactly I am hiding from.

"Art is not meant to be polite, secret, coded, or timid," Allison wrote. As artists, we can't afford to hide. Sharbat Gula, the Afghan Girl, didn't hide. She showed her face and unknowingly brought attention to the devastation Afghanistan refugees were facing. By simply being artists, we must heed Dorothy Allison's call for action.

Through Images

When I read chapter 3 and chapter 7 of the book, it got me thinking. Not just by the ideas said, but also by the various images presented. In chapter 3, the short story of Fish Cheeks by Amy Tan it was very relatable in the sense that we do not tend to pay attention to details in everyday life, but when we realize it it is usually later on or when the moment may not always be the best. When she told the story about how she thought her family and their customs where defined as "embarrassing" when the boy she has a crush on joins them for dinner on Christmas Eve she only dwells on that and not on what her mother had done for her. Her mom prepared her favorite Chinese food items. That is when it hit her that her mom took the time to think of her and she didn't do that for her with her embarrassment. This made me realize that I also tend to dwell on myself when dire moments happen but forget the details and the people involved. I know that with film I will definitely not let this slip me by. I really want to make it a goal in my filmmaking to pay attention to details and not overlook things. The Iwo Jima image was an impacting image because I actually went to Washington DC and saw the memorial statue that was based of it. I don't know, but that image can give me a huge sense of how important that flag is to the soldier, they could even die for it. This is how I felt. Even the photographers risk their lives for their passion. The Ground Zero one also shows this with the very future-istic chaotic scene out of "The Day After Tomorrow" or some film like that. Then I got to chapter 7, many of the images and dialogue that came with them were very impacting and really hit home as well. One of the images Omayra Sanchez and short comentary of it by Isabel Allende made me kind of mad. It was mostly because I found out that this girl died... "what the heck was the photographer doing at that moment besides taking the photo? Shouldn't he try to save her?!" But aside from my emotional soap box... it really captured grueling and stomach turning thoughts that someone could have over the last moments of a human being, especially an innocent 13 year old, in the last moments of their life. I can remember what I was doing on an impacting event like September 11. I was a teenager and was at a car repair shop with mom who was getting her oil changed. Then we saw on the news what appeared to be some kind of trailer for a movie about terrorist attacking New York...but it was not, it was real. I couldn't believe it until I got home...and we found out from various news sources that it was so. Those images of the burning towers always come to mind whenever I think of the feelings and actions I have towards someone else. Because we never know when we will see them again or if we will be still standing on this Earth tomorrow. 

shocking

We see hundreds of images every day, whether it’s new photos on facebook, billboards, ads, textbook stuff, powerpoints, movies, etc etc. Like it said in last week’s readings on “seeing,” we often don’t even notice the details of images we see anymore. But this week the topics in the book went even further, and I thought about how desensitized I as a casual image viewers have become. I’m sure we have images of September 11 burned into our minds as clear as the day we watched it happen live. Maybe it’s the same news images of tsunami or hurricane Katrina victims. Not to be facetious at all, I remember clearly the newspaper article from the day I found out Heath Ledger died. Why do such negative and disturbing images have such a way of hanging around in our minds?
My question probably doesn’t bring anything new to the table, I’m sure you have all thought about it before, but isn’t that interesting? For something to actually grab our attention it has to be shocking. The explanations could vary by person, or by the day, or just how we happen to be feeling the instant something tragic happens. It is sadly but certainly an escape from the mundane, a tragic sort of thrill. But I also think these images can serve a more constructive purpose if they bring us out of apathy and help make us more aware of how important and fragile this life is.

Seeing

Observing the ordinary. I read the chapter name and frowned. I already know how to do this, I thought. It’s true. I do know how to observe, but what I didn’t realize was how much I was missing. Sure, I look at things, pick them up, and know what they are called, (cup, pencil, desk, tree), but this chapter made me realize that I look but do not see. I am a passive viewer. I deem things as too mundane or ordinary to actively engage in viewing, and pass right by them. Even when I read the first bit of the chapter I was skipping the pictures, rushing to finish. I had to force myself to go back and search the pictures. I wonder how different my life would be if I stopped and “smelled the roses”. How often do I watch the clock, waiting for each class to end, only to move to another room to watch the clock once more?

Once upon a time I was like Annie Dillard. I remember “seeing”, looking out across a field and seeing the dust in the air and the bugs in the grass. Now I see nothing but a field. Something inside must be broken, or lost, or perhaps I have done what all children do, I’ve grown up. As horrid as that is, it’s true; at one point I must have decided that the patience of “seeing” is not as valuable as the constant entertainment of a busy mind. The more I read of Dillard’s essay, the stronger I felt. I am in need of “seeing” the things I only look at, of knowing what I always pass by, of discovering who I am by discovering the world around me. No longer am I content. Today I begin my journey back to observing the ordinary.

A Whole New World

This was a terrifically interesting reading assignment. I found the assignment itself almost to be an allegory of the subjects examined within. When I first realized how huge the chapters were, I was feeling fairly daunted. As I began to read, however, I found the experience to be enjoyable and full of pictures (yay).
I have never taken the time to enjoy the “in-between” parts of life. I think that as life continues to move faster, as technology continues to progress, as we grow up, time moves faster and faster and we continue to miss important experiences, sights, sounds, relationships, etc. that are right in front of us. This reading assignment reminded me of the scene from The Lion King when Simba, Timon and Pumbaa are all looking at the stars, and Timon says that the stars are fireflies that got stuck in “that sticky black stuff” (or something to that extent). His creative explanation reminded me that the “sticky black stuff” does in fact exist, and should not go unnoticed. How many times to I look at a lawn to be mowed, or a chore to be done, and forget to see the “sticky black stuff”, the individual pieces of grass and the dirt underneath, and the miracle of how it all fits together in a perfect self-sustaining “circle of life”?
I think it would be interesting to spend a week making note of the in-between-stuff that goes on and that really holds our lives together.
Likening this again to the Gospel, I’m reminded to live life one day at a time, finding joy in the journey. Finding the moments where God’s hand is guiding me in my life. From the simple things like finding a parking space, to even simpler instances of getting this blog post up in time; the in-between moments, God’s hand in our lives, are what make life beautiful.

There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's

For me, this reading had a different impact on me than I think the authors intended simply because of the arrangement and context of reading all of these pieces together. For me, the arrangement of these readings were kind of a commentary on style and the importance of having it. As Mont so aptly pointed out, 'Seeing' and 'Ode to an Orange' were essentially the same piece in reciprocal. While Seeing dealt with the extremes to which our sense of sight can be stretched to, 'Ode to an Orange' narrowed in on a specific object and explored all five senses surrounding it. Each of these stories do essentially the same thing and just go to an extreme degree of detail surrounding one concept or idea. What I took away from these stories was that the content (although great) isn't what made these readings masterpieces. What made them stand out was the style or context in which they were relayed to us. The photographs had a similar message. While the content may have been regular (or even banal to some audiences), the value resides mostly in the fashion in which the material was portrayed. The photograph of the refrigerator was the perfect example of this for me. I honestly found it bland at first glance but made a conscious effort to study each component of the photograph (which were many.) After a while I began to appreciate the time and care the artist took to rearrange certain things to emphasize the happy life in suburbia and I interpreted it as a fulfillment of the American dream. Whether or not that was the message the photographer attempted to convey is not as important as how they attempted to keep me on the same page as them. While content is a huge portion of great art, context is what really brings it to life.