Away from Home are some and I…

That looks nothing like my house.  I don’t think that looks anything like anyone’s house. It looks a little structurally unsound to me and there is an entire lack of curb appeal, probably due to the lack of curb.  You can’t blame the artists though, no one tells first graders to be more realistic during art class. Here is my actual house:

Thanks google maps!

That is the only picture I can find of my house.  I have never taken a picture of it, and until now I have never felt that I was lacking.  I see this picture and I know it is my house: It was my address in google maps, the house, the driveway, the detached garage, and the backyard patio are all mine, too.  I recognize these things as being parts of my house but I’ve never looked at them like this.  This way, this birds-eye, property view is not the place I recognize.  This picture looks like my house, but this picture does not look like my home.  My memory of home has nothing to do with the property lines or floor plans.  To me my home looks like this:

Come to think of it my home looks like this too:

What? You don’t think there’s a beach in central New Jersey?

You caught me.  There isn’t a beach in Morristown and that picture wasn’t taken there.  Actually, none of the places in the second crop of pictures are actually at the house depicted in the google map – but they are all still home to me, although they don’t take place at my actual home.

When others look at the pictures the only constants are the familiar faces that carry over from photograph to photograph.  While you can see these faces, and hairstyles and heights change over time, the pictures all have the same basic formula:  it’s me and some of the people who are important to me beaming (and sometimes blinking) at a camera.  They are obligatory pictures, but we are all happy to oblige.  The truth is I have been taking these same photographs for years and years.  Every part of the year has a specific place for me- and that is my home for that time and event.

Over the summer we take the picture of all my cousins on the beach.  Later, just my sister and I go back to the beach to take pictures for our holiday card.  Before the first day of school or before going to temple on the high holy days my sister and I take pictures by the bush in front of my garage.  On the first night of Hanukah we take a picture of my sister standing in front of me while lighting the menorah in the dining room.  At Christmas we take a group picture of everyone in our living room with my grandpa in the middle.  On St. Patrick’s day we are at my Aunt Patty’s house in Florida and take a picture by their pool of everyone wearing their resounding green.  At Easter we take a picture of the cousin on my Aunt Gina’s front steps right before the egg hunt. By spring the bush in front of my garage has leaves again and I can take more pictures in front of it – just in time for prom.  The cycle repeats itself over and over.

My life is a series of repeated photographs.  Most people’s are.  Who doesn’t have first day of school photos? Holiday photos? Vacation photos? Birthday photos?  This process repeats and all of the sudden you feel like that guy who took a picture of himself every day for 8 years (http://jk-keller.com/daily-photo/).  You may do this with more time in between your pictures but you do it for about 18 years.  I did, at least.

Then it was time for this picture:

And by August I was off to a new place that I only new as this:

or this:

I recognized Vanderbilt, like I recognized an aerial picture of my Morristown house – I knew it was where I would live, but it did not look like my home. I couldn’t even imagine being inside, the way I can imagine my own house.  I didn’t know what the inside of the building would look like and more importantly I didn’t know how I would look on the inside of the buildings.

The first thing that started to make me feel at home was actually a photograph.  Before I got to my future room, my future roommate put this picture on facebook:

She captioned it “our own little hall”

She tagged me in that picture and thus the picture of the door technically became the first picture of me at Vanderbilt.  One little picture kicked off four-years of living and taking pictures in my new home.  It clicked that here is where I’d be instead of in NJ.

Because I go to school so far away from New Jersey I cannot be in all of the pictures that I used to – there is no first day of school picture of me in my driveway, or pre-egg hunt in my pajamas, and a few others I am missing from as well – but that hasn’t stopped me from taking new pictures of my new experiences with new friends.  Every one of the iconic photographs that I perpetually take with my family started with a single picture.  Then we decided we liked it, all of it – the day, the moment, the people, and the picture – so we decided to do it again.  Over time, these moments and these people are no longer just a snapshot in time, but the repeated experience makes it our home.  Home is the place where the things happen that you want to repeat.

Some people get caught up thinking that home is simply where you start from, but home is really the places you establish as you go throughout your life.  There’s no limit on the places that you can make your home, it is only a matter of finding places and people that you keep wanting to come back to.

On the pin board in my kitchen there is a picture of my mother and her friends on their graduation day from nursing school, and here they are at Judy’s son’s wedding many years later.

They have a reunion every year, wedding or not, and have always found a way to come back to one another.  Now that I have embarked on my own college experience they are my inspiration for finding people who I want to surround myself with, who I want to see year after year.  I look forward to turning new places and people into my home away from home.  There is no limit on the place that you can call home, but it is not a matter of just finding them, it is a matter of keeping them and making them a part of your tradition.  Live. Smile. Photograph. And repeat.

a bit homier now

Favorite Place

Think of a place.  Your favorite place in the whole world.

What are you imagining?

You’re probably thinking of the good times you had there, the people you shared your time with, the time the weather was perfect, those funny jokes that were made amongst your friends or family or something equally enjoyable.

You’re probably not thinking about that turbulent plane ride or cramped car ride you took to get there.  I don’t think that time you got thirsty and cranky during a tour and fought with your family came to mind.  That terrible jellyfish sting wasn’t involved in your memory of your favorite place?

Our favorite places have a way of doing that to us.  The good memories drown out the bad ones.  Not so much that you forget that they happened but just enough that you don’t mind them when your making your decision to go back.

It is because of this that I connected most with Pamuk’s description of his visits to Bosphorus with his family during his childhood.  He explains traveling to Bosphorus on Sundays with his family and starting to growing weary of these trips especially the car rides and quarrels with his brother but it never actually taints the picture of Bosphorus in his mind’s eye.  He explains, “In later years, when I would see other noisy, unhappy, quarrelsome families in other cars on he Bosphorus road… what impressed me most was not the commonalities in our lives but the fact that, for many Istanbul families, the Bosphorus was their only solace” (61).  Although he realizes that there are unpleasant experiences associated with Bosphorus he still remembers it as the place he enjoyed.  It’s a place he can go when everything else is wrong, a place that is always good even though circumstances around getting there or sibling interactions are not.

Long Beach Island is my happy place.  It is where I want to be when I’m not there.  It is where all my favorite memories with my family have happened.  Experiences of being forced to frantically clean before the company arrives, fighting with cousins about what movie to watch, and a few debilitating sunburns fall by wayside when I call to mind images of my favorite place.  “Life can’t be all that bad, I’d think from time to time.  Whatever happens, I can always take a walk along” the beach (61).

Opposite of Boltanski?

This is a series I did in response to Christian Boltanski’s work.  The people are all in shadow and appear similar because they are all photographs taken in the same place and were subsequently displayed all together.  However, I did – my series to celebrate the individuality of each person by showing their personal signature and trying to reveal their personalities through a unique pose that also clearly shows their bodies.

Photo Keys

 

I have no problem admitting that Sebald’s use of photography in “Max Ferber” completely confused me.

 That was until page 221. 

 On page 221 he offers up a picture of two keys that supposedly would open the gate to the cemetery.  However, “When [he] reached the gate it turned out that neither of the keys fitted the lock, so [he] climbed the wall” (222).  Reading this, I realized that the keys that can’t unlock anything are the perfect metaphor for the pictures in the story.  The keys look like they are the answer to unlocking secrets.  Just as you expect the keys to unlock the gates to the cemetery and help reveal information the narrator is looking for, we expect the pictures in the story to reveal things the text could not.  But it both cases, it is more likely that we have to rely on ourselves to find out the information we seek.  We have to jump over the real or metaphoric fence and look for the things we hoped we would have more clues to find.

Pictures are supposed to reveal the truth, and show us the things that happened and confirm things we’ve heard about.  But in this story, it seems like every picture only looks like it is going to reveal something when in reality it is just a skeleton key. 

Model Behavior

Once I was walking up the Spanish Steps in Rome, camera in hand, when a woman in a red dress caught my attention.  Not only did she capture my attention (as a women in an evening gown is apt to do in the early afternoon), but she caused much of a stir as the tourists bottlenecked around her and her circle that the photographer and the photographer’s assistant created.  Of course!  She was model (the only thing that could explain such inappropriate midday dress). But the attention she garnered from every passerby made it near impossible to notice anyone in street clothes, including her posse.  She had a glow about her, which was more than likely an effect of the assistant with a reflector, but a glow nonetheless that alerted everyone that she was the most beautiful person we would see that day.

And at this moment I must admit, I stopped foot traffic with the worst of them.  I couldn’t compel myself not to take pictures when such an opportunity presented itself but at the same time I also couldn’t bring myself to stop on the Spanish Steps and get the pictures I actually wanted.  Instead I slowed to that awful tourist pace, took four quick, unsatisfying, snapshots of the model and her crew staring unhappily at the gazing and picture-taking sightseers that ruined their photo shoot.

The photo above is the closest thing I could get to the picture I wanted of that model.  I wanted to have a photograph to remember her as I saw her – the tall, stunning, luminescent, statuette that she was – but instead I got an interrupted shot, including the people I did not mean to fit in the frame.  She would not pose or pout for me, but would rather wait, absent of expression, for me to pass.  Perhaps it was so that neither I nor the hundreds of tourists that passed could steal away her essence before her photographer could capture it.  Perhaps the model only had enough energy to satisfy the lens of one photographer.  Perhaps she was simply annoyed at the continuous stream of gawkers.  I will never fully know, I can only guess.  But regardless the picture I have is not the image I want to or do remember when I think of that day.

I have a picture of this model in a behind-the-scenes moment.  Her photographer instructs her and the assistant holds the reflectors away from her.  That is how the moment of the photograph actually happened, that is what I technically saw, and it is what my camera captured.  But in my memory I see a glamorous woman in a red gown on the Spanish steps striking a pose as a normal part of her glamorous day, as common and less glamorous people pass by.  I would bet that that was the picture that the photographer hoped to get and I’m sure she achieved that goal.  It was also the picture I wanted. It was the memory I wanted to have on paper.

I am glad that the photographer has this photograph whether it is in a magazine or a portfolio or somewhere else.  I am glad that on paper she may have the photography I never took, but the memory I have anyway.  My memory may not be realistic (as my photograph proves) but for that photographer its possible she got to see that through her very lens.  I am only unhappy that it could not be me that could make the vision and the reality coincide.

Athleticism

Above is a picture of my sister playing field hockey at her club team tournament that took place in Arizona over Thanksgiving break this year.  She wears her captain band around her shin guard and is looking to do a pull move to thwart the defender who tries to steal the ball from her.

What strikes me the most is how confident she looks.  Her muscles look strong and lean, she has composure with her dribble, and her hair is so tightly pulled off from her face with a headband and a braid.  She looks serious.  And it is not just that she looks serious in this moment, but you can tell that she has treated camps, preseason, school field hockey, and club practice all with the same amount of importance in order to get to this tournament.

I never looked this way when I played field hockey during high school. I figured out that my talents lie elsewhere and so I take pictures from the sidelines.

In Georges Perec’s book he includes a novel about the island, W where, “The survival of the fittest is the law of this land; yet the struggle itself is nothing, for it is not Sport for Sport’s sake, achievement for the sake of achievement, which motivates the men of W, but thirst for victory, victory at any price” (Perec 89).  And it made me think back to the nature of sports themselves.  I’m not sure that Sport can really exist for Sport’s sake or that achievement can exist for achievement’s sake.  The only thing you can ultimately achieve in sports is the victory, and any other minor achievement is minor on the way to a win (improvements to become a better player hopefully lead to victory).

The people who play sports, ultimately become a self-selecting group because people don’t just participate in sports for the participation, they participate to win.  It happened with my sister and me.  I never played on as many teams as she did and I quit as soon as my senior season is over.  She however plays on three teams a year and hopes to play in college someday.  Athletes continue with their efforts, only because they still have a chance to achieve victory.  Victory is the only and ultimate goal.

 These two pictures are both of the same place, they were taken moments apart, and yet they look entirely different.  The only difference is the change that a camera can make.

I went outside at about midnight hoping to take pictures with my camera flash that would reveal what I could not see in the darkness.  But I have to admit, I did not stray too far from my dorm realizing I become scared of the dark after 12 am.  The thing is, all the buildings are illuminated during all hours of the day and night and there are light posts everywhere.  While you cannot see as well as during the day, there is decent visibility in the Commons area.  However all those lights cat shadows all over the freshman campus.

I stopped by some stone stairs and the shadow of a handrail on the wall because It struck me how all of the straight lines intersected each other.  But I forgot to turn off the flash on my camera before the first shot, and so the image was returned to me without the shadows that I wanted to capture.  I turned off the flash in order to get the picture I actually intended to capture and saw that the images were even more different than I thought they would be.  It wasn’t just the shadows that were changed by the flash, every color was altered by the artificial light brightening the picture.

In part XVI of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin states, “In most cases the diverse aspects of reality captured by the film camera lie outside the normal spectrum of sense impressions” (Benjamin 118), but after I took these two photos, I cannot be sure that that is true.  What is the normal impression I get of these stairs that I see every day?  I cannot tell if it is more true to my senses to see the shadows cast by artificial lights in the middle of the night or if the flash of my camera can imitate the brightness of a normal day.  Are the bricks more reddish or washed out; are the stairs lighter gray with multicolored stone or darker with lighter colored stones.  Before I never cared enough to take notice.  The pictures even with different amounts of technology employed (flash versus no flash) revealed to me details beyond my normal perceptions.

Forget what you think you know.

 

            People turn the last page of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and look up from the book with an entirely new take on photography.  Before they merely looked at photos as permanent representations of events that happened –whether or not they remembered the actual events– and gave it no more thought.  After finishing Barthes’ memoir, however, they call everything into question.  In her post entitled The Real and the Reel, sloankatherine becomes confused with her “sense of self and relationship to time and the world” after seeing a photograph of herself that she doesn’t remember taking, although she believes she remembers the day it was taken, which was the day her younger brother was born.  She describes feeling that she had memories from that day, but upon realizing that she doesn’t remember the photograph taken of her and her family (which indisputably happened) she also realizes that the “memories” she thinks she had may have also been informed by photographs and stories her family showed and told her.  Due to this realization, she contends that photography does not block memory, as Barthes suggests (91) but can actually “supplement and confuse” it.

While  sloankatherine deals with her memory being corrected by a photograph, in her post entitled Evidence in Disguise, deihazel struggles with the idea that a photograph of a person in disguise (a costume of “The Mask”) can potentially obscure a memory, so that eventually no one would be able to remember the true identity of the man in the photo.  She grapples with the idea that although something depicted in a picture must have occurred,(citing Barthes idea of the noeme or the that–has–been) in the case of the disguised man, she finds that “this picture is not conclusive proof of his presence” because you cannot tell who it is just by the image.   sloankatherine and deihazel discuss similar and overlapping concepts although their examples highlight the opposite roles of photography.  The picture of the brother’s birthday informs the truth about that day and sloankatherine’s memories while the truth about the picture of The Mask can only be held by deihazel‘s memory.

In a completely different way, in her post Summer in the Back of My Mind, dwliu discusses the same concept of how a photograph can interact with the memory an event.  During a beach trip with friends, she took a double exposure photograph that depicted something that literally couldn’t and didn’t occur in real life– because the two moments could not occur at the same time, in the same frame.  However a friend that was with her at the beach believed that the particular image “managed to encapsulate the essence of that day in one photograph”.  Somehow an event that had not happened became a photograph that most accurately depicted the experience.  In this case, true and personal memory was best inspired by a false image and once again it is proven that photography and memory do not directly correlate as these authors used to think it did.

 Through their individual experiences with photography and memory, all three authors arrive at the same conclusion about photographs.  Photographs are supposed to be physical tokens of memories but the photographs and the memories that they represent do not necessarily coincide.  Depending on the situation the photograph may be the best representation of the truth while a memory is clouded with inaccuracy and ambiguity or completely the opposite.  They all are taken with Barthes idea that “Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory… but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory,” (91), but all in very different ways. deihazel thinks that this may be true, just because the nature of photography only preserves what is seen.  In real life, seeing someone in a disguise or a costume is an entire experience complete with understanding of the context (why the person wears a costume) and understanding of the costumed person’s identity.  A photo will only show the costume, so one day, the memory could be overshadowed or obscured by the image without the additional information of the experience.  sloankatherine and dwliu, actually use the Barthes quote in both of their blog posts –although they each describe wholly different situations– to refute Barthes’ claims.  The blog authors prefer to think of the photographs, even if confusing, as better informants of memory that actually cause more memories to surface. 

Through the analysis of these three posts, a central idea struck me that unified them all.  What if, by taking photographs, we are not blocking our memories but rather we are trying to create memories as they will be remembered or how we want to remember them?

With that thought, I remembered something else I read that more scientifically explored the discrepancy between memory and photography.  Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago and Erin Whitchurch of the University of Virginia conducted a study to see if people could identify their own faces (http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/EpleyWhitchurch.pdf).  Seems simple enough, right?  They took both male and female subjects and took a photograph of them making a neutral face.  Two to four weeks after the photograph was taken they invited the people back to see if they could identify themselves out of a lineup.  However, there was a catch, the “lineup” was eleven slightly varying versions of their own photo.  Five versions of the photo were morphed to varying degrees with a standardly attractive face and five versions of the photo were morphed to varying degrees with a standardly unattractive face.  An interesting thing happened: when the people selected the photos of what they thought was their true self, most people picked a photo that was slightly more standardly attractive than their original photo.

People have an image of themselves supplied by their memory of their lives and what they think they see in the mirror but it is probably more attractive than what might actually be shown in photographs.  (Do you know anyone who claims to hate how they look in pictures or not to be photogenic?)  But this is 2012, forget about the days of film cameras when you took a picture and wouldn’t know how it came out until it was developed, and then the image couldn’t be repeated.  With a digital camera you can instantly see what you look like and if you don’t like it, you can try again.  This selection process is especially seen with the frequent use of facebook.  Pictures of people are constantly being posted and tagged, and of course, not all of them are great, luckily there is an “untag” button.  By selective tagging and untagging, people can choose only associate their identity with “good“, attractive pictures of themselves.  Now peoples’ perceptions of themselves can influence how they display themselves to the rest of their friends and the world.  We have control over how our image will be remembered, even if it is a stretch of the truth.

Barthes states that “the Photograph is violent […] because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed” (Barthes, 91); but is it the photograph that is violent? Could it be that we are the violent ones? It is not the objects (the camera, the photograph, the image on a computer screen) that have power, they are after all inanimate objects and cannot do anything other than what they are employed to do.  We take the photos, make the photos, and interpret them.  We are the ones who fill or replace our own memories.

Happy as they Seem

As sketchy as I looked taking pictures of random students as they went about their days, I cannot bear to publish them.  First of all, they are not good pictures and are simply not a representation of good photography, and secondly, none of the pictures would actually say what I want them to, to any other viewer.

By acknowledging that none of the photographs could depict what I wanted to an audience, I realized none of the pictures could because I was trying to, somehow, capture how I felt by photographing other people.  As I took pictures of people walking off to class, or into the Munchie Mart, or sitting eating breakfast, my camera captured exactly what I saw everyday: people who look totally content and busy, people who are just living their lives and as far as I can tell, look happy.  But that’s not actually what I wanted the picture I wanted.  What I wanted to reveal is how I feel when I see so many people (who I may or may not know) looking happy, as far as I can see.

One on the main struggles in the novel is the narrator dealing with confusion about her Levantine origins, I cannot exactly relate to what that feels like to not know how your group of people fits into the world.  However I can empathize with the excerpt from the story, “A Childhood in Egypt” by Jacqueline Kahanoff, when she discussing not knowing her place around her peers.  She says, “I could not share my feelings and thoughts with anyone, not even the other children, because I had no way of knowing if they were as happy as they seemed” (Matalon 181).

Day to day I see people, people I don’t know and people I do know, going about their lives, and I cannot see what is happening underneath.  I had hoped that maybe my photographing some of the surface appearance might be eroded away, but the truth is the camera will only capture what there is to be seen on the surface.

I think that’s why the narrator so often references pictures that she cannot show us.  Because the truth is, even if she could “find” them to put in the book, the pictures of other people would never reveal to us, what she actually wants to say about herself, her life, and her family.

 

 

More Photographs

Photographs are just epitaphs in pictures.

About few things is there absolute certainty, however both epitaphs and photographs express certainty about two things.  One, that something happened; and two that the same something no longer exists.  Photography confirms the existence and passing of an event while epitaphs confirm the existence and passing of a person.  The similarities between the two methods of remembrance consume Barthes until he eventually can see no difference between remembering one who has died by photography and seeing a picture of anyone, as they too will be dead one day.

Barthes wrote his entire memoir, Camera Lucida, grappling with the death of his mother.  He describes flipping through photographs one November, trying to summon memories of his mother, when suddenly he stumbles on a photograph of her that he feels represents “the truth of the face [he] had loved” (Barthes 67).  This photograph is, in fact, a depiction of his mother that he had never actually seen (she is a child in the photograph), but he is so stricken by the photograph as a representation of his dead mother that he says, “In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die” (96).  With this he realizes that every child in a photograph must eventually grow up and so he comes to the morbid conclusion that “whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe” (96).  Every person faces the same fate as Barthes’s mother.

There is an interconnectedness between remembrance of the dead and photography.  Invariably, one day everyone in the photograph will die, and if the photo still exists by that time, it will be merely a keepsake of the descendants so that they may see their ancestors.  In that way epitaphs and photographs are very similar.  What do epitaphs do but give brief insight to the life of a person, the things they loved to do, and the people they were loved by?  Epitaphs are the bare minimum descriptions of actions a deceased person will be remembered for just as photographs are brief moments that someone thought were worthy of preserving to be remembered photographically.

These pictures might as well say: Here lies the Foley Girls.  They lived, they loved, and they went to the beach.

Or so Barthes would say.

Only Barthes could look on this lovely picture of young girls and see not family, friendship, or fun memories at the beach (as I do), but perceive it just as he does at the Portrait of Lewis Payne by Alexander Gardner (95).  In the photograph Lewis Payne is waiting to be hanged and will immediately die after the photograph is taken.   But Barthes interprets this a step further thinking not only that “the photograph tells [him] of death in the future” but all photographs tell of death in the future (96).  He assumes that what is true about his mother in the Winter Garden Photograph and Lewis Payne in his portrait must be the truth of photography for everyone.

I see things entirely differently.

The photographs above were taken in July of 2010 and 2011 respectively, but my cousins, my sister, and I have been taking this same picture since 1997, when there were only four of us that could stand long enough for the picture to be taken.  I remember it specifically; each one of us wore a differently colored striped tank top and a matching bandana and we were more bothered by taking the photograph than anything else.  Now, looking back, I cannot imagine how we would remember growing up without these pictures.

Each year before we take the new picture, we line up all of the old photographs and we can literally see how much we have changed.  The pictures add together to the summation of what our lives have become.  Over the years, the picture has evolved as all my cousins and I have gone through different stages.  The four younger cousins enter the photographs one at a time, first being held by the eldest on her hip on the right side of the photograph before they get moved to their proper place on the left.  I can see the younger girls grow into the matching outfits from comically oversized tee shirts to actually fitting clothes.  By 2005 the second eldest far out grew the eldest and the shift in heights caused the eldest to start wearing heels to try to keep our usual formation, but our pictures would never be the same.  Every year we establish a new normal and the pictures help us to see how we’ve grown and changed.

Barthes sees every picture as a count down, describing cameras as “clocks for seeing” describing the click of the camera lens as analogous to a ticking clock (15).  He thinks that every picture that is taken is one more moment the person has already lived and will not live again.  But I think that taking this photograph every year is not taking away from the life we have left to live, but is a great way of celebrating the life we have already lived.  I feel that every year adds another photo to the number we have taken and the years we have lived.  Photography is not subtraction but addition.  it is not a countdown but a stopwatch.   As I perceive it, photography is more and more pictures that can be taken and not less and less.  These photographs with my cousins inspire me to believe that every year will bring another year, another photograph, and more change.

Here are the Foley Girls, they live, they love, and they will continue to come back to the beach.