PROPOSAL
For my first experiment, I highlighted the story of Blaze Bernstein’s murder and the details surrounding it. While it was a profile of Blaze done in the style of the New Yorker, looking forward from it I saw it developing into an indication of a lack of community support for LGBT individuals and on an even broader sense, the effect isolation or exclusion from others has on an individual. In this piece, I am taking it to a more visual perspective to illustrate what isolation looks like, and how people hold on to moments where they felt the most alone. The other portion that is rooted in the story of Blaze is the image that I imagined when Blaze’s parents had to return to Penn to pick up his things. I wondered what items evoked more painful or more joyful memories. I didn’t want to center my piece around these objects however, because I felt this would be invasive and also a projection of my own ideas about loss rather than that of different individuals. The purpose of this piece is to explore how people view loss, and the different ways they experience loss in their lives. Is it something which causes them fear, or something one becomes accustomed to? In what ways might someone compensate for this fear?
Finally, to what physical artifacts do people attribute these feelings? The project inherently pokes at one’s uncomfortability with loss and change, which I hope prompts the viewer to consider their own feelings on the matter. These questions drive how I chose the visual medium in which this project will take place, and the genre associated to it.
The project attempts to answer these questions by using portraits of individuals with a specific item that carry a memory for them of a time when they felt loss. In engaging the subject in discussion about the object, I hope to take pictures that reflect part of their sentiment towards the object. The specific choice of photograph is important here as well since I will use polaroids. I use polaroids because they bring out a sense of nostalgia. They have recently made a resurgence in popular culture after being fashionable nearly twenty years ago, and I got my polaroid as a graduation gift from high school, so for me it inherently is about change. I believe that the value people see in polaroids is that they give someone something physical to carry on to from the memory. In this way as well, the physical polaroid mirrors the object photographed as being a physical representation of the memory’s that one associates with this difficult time.
Finally, I’ll ask that the subjects write a phrase or word on the polaroid that reminds them of this time as well after the discussion has ended. It will showcase a more personal touch, especially given the differences in handwriting. I believe the sum of these parts will make a project that serves as a collective to how memories tied to objects either establish or reject notions of nostalgia. It will also demonstrate how people relate to their change and perhaps cope with it.