Happy Thanksgiving!

I guess I'm in the habit of updating Fridays so I figure I'll post even though it's break!

I went to my little baby cousin's first birthday party last weekend and there were cute little children everywhere, it was a good time. I generally don't take people photos because I just don't get them but I wanted to practice sooo therefore why not take photos of people that are hyperactive and don't stand still in a low-light environment, amIright?

Anyhow, I think I got some cute photos and they are perfectly fine for like a "First Birthday Memories" Album buuut yeah. I got one that I really liked which is the one I'll be posting. Vinny is such a camera ham, he's totally aware of the camera, it's cute. He doesn't pose, I mean, he's one, but he kinda just smiles...and then tries to touch your camera with his sticky little baby fingers. It's cute!!

Vincent had a pumpkin cupcake...in that it looked like a pumpkin, not that it was pumpkin flavored. Babies eating=SO CUTE because they get food everywhere. There was orange frosting all on Vinny's face (not in this photo, he has a little but it got worse) and then there was this kid in the cutest little orange Tigger outfit. And I don't know what it is about balloons but kids freakin' love them.


This is so funny, how unlike my last couple of posts is this post?

Whatever, Vincent is a cutie, that Tigger kid was so cute too, he was having so much fun. I also loved that all the balloons had strings long enough that if a kid accidently let go, the balloon would end up being just JUST out of reach of about half the kids there so every few minutes, one of the younger kids would drop the balloon, realize they couldn't reach the string and then start crying until an adult or older kid walked by and pulled it down.

Scavenging Carcass

It's that time of the week again! And this time I'm not emo, promise!

:)

I'm actually really excited about my photos this week so I'm not really sure where to begin. I was really excited to show them in class too which is really weird because critiques actually make me queasy generally and I try to get in early enough to put my photos up to get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. This week I came in early because I was really excited about my photos and wanted to get reactions as soon as possible, crazy!

Anyways, Monday was my 21st birthday. It was nice. Birthdays aren't generally too exciting for me but since I stayed awake from noon Sunday until 7:30p.m. Monday (I was writing a paper and I procrastinate...then I had photo, then I had the class the paper was due in, then my mom and brother and grandma and grandpa came to see me...no sleep) so I consider Sunday part of my birthday too, if only because part of Sunday was dedicated to making photos and I had so much fun making them that I want to consider that my birthday celebration

So I went to bed at like 10pm on my 21st birthday, obviously a wild and crazy time with mom, bro, grandma and grandpa :) I had fun with them though and I'm really glad they came. Not much you can do on your 21st birthday when it's a Monday night and none of your friends are 21 anyways!

Back on topic, I guess I'll start with my apples, which were part two of my pretty literal interpretation of the Holocaust through fruit. This time, with apples, this time with perpetrator and victim together. I had had this idea for awhile and for awhile I had considered having some other fruit (a pear?) overseeing these emaciated apples to be like "Oh, this fruit is persecuting this other fruit for being different." But then it occurred to me that the Holocaust and other genocides are based on a perceived difference, not that there is an actual difference between perpetrator and victim. Someone who is Jewish is no different than someone who is German, who is French, who is American, who is Turkish, who is Armenian, who is whatever. It's a perceived difference but when it comes down to it we are all humans. So I had the perpetrator be a fellow apple. I also thought it was pretty arrogant of me to think I have a right to stereotype one type of fruit as a perpetrator. Who am I to say a pear is more prone to fruitocide than say a peach or a plum or an orange? I decided that putting that on a particular fruit was too much and not really my place.






I rather like the way they turned out in terms of how really emaciated the victims are in comparison to the big fatty and I had a good time messing with saturation to kind of give it more of a downtrodden, sad effect

Next up is my true pride. I had bought a bunch of fruits and decided to massacre them. I did so in a very orderly fashion, systematically and with actually fairly little mess (comparatively).



I shot my photos, many of them in fact, then told my friends Beth and Charlotte that they should have some of the fruit because I was done shooting and it wasn't right for me to just waste food. I put the lens cap back on my camera and started tidying up some of the fairly ordered mess. And then I thought, I should just snap some shots of us scavenging these carcasses so I shot a few frames of Beth and Charlotte being vultures and when we had completely destroyed the fruit and our tummies had their fill, I was left with a more beautiful destruction than I could have ever hoped for. The best things come completely unexpectedly, don't they? We really massacred that fruit. We were on the floor so table manners were thrown out the window completely. I had watermelon all over my face and in my hair. Pomegranate seeds and skin were everywhere, watermelon juices mixed with lemon juices mixed with pomegranate juices mixed with grapefruit juices mixed with lime juices. And by the way, pomegranate and lemon= absolute heaven. I kind of like to think of it as a mix of all the massacres of the past flowing into one collective history of mankind. I'm a history major, I can't help but think that way and massacres are not the doing of one nation against one people. Time and time again it is humanity that disappoints, whether through direct perpetration or through complicity or through overlooking, avoiding, denying. It's never the problem of one nation or people, it's a problem of humanity. Or you can always interpret the destruction however you like, I take to my photos my own preoccupation with massacres so that becomes my interpretation but I like to think you can take them however you like.



I might post some of the progression shots of how it turned from ordered chaos to absolute chaos at some point...

PEACEOUTMOTHAS

with love, Shaylyn

I'm Awkward and Emo...Sorry :)

Friday is finally here! Praise Jesus!

Ummm, sooo, okay, awkwardness…let’s dive right into it

I’ve been playing with this idea in my head, right? I don’t know where it’s going but I’ve been doing a lot of fruit lately. And it’s been a fruitful week (geddit? Fruitful! Like full of fruit literally and also fruitful in what has come out of the week in terms of photos…you get it)

Well, I can’t tell if it has really, I feel okay about my photos which isn’t necessarily indicative of how they will be received. Because when I threw up my peppers I thought they were going to be a disaster and they turned out to be well-recieved. Actually, usually my most successful images are those that I think are just ridiculous.

So I’ve had this idea. I mean, the thing is that I’m in three Holocaust and Genocide classes (Holocaust: Agency and Action, The Armenian Genocide, Jews in Modern Europe) and my head is just filled to the absolute brim with these concepts and these horrors. I was really excited about this semester…and nervous, apparently with good reason…I thought I would be engaged but now the classes are seriously taking a toll on me. I just did not anticipate being so emotionally drained…well, sorry, I did, but it was more of a passing fancy while I secretly believed I’d be able to handle it.

Good gracious, no. I have never cried so hard studying for an exam as I did for my last Holocaust test, and I’m sure I’ve shed plenty of stressful tears over tests before. But redoing readings, looking through notes, finding examples to use…I am at wit’s end.

So I thought about it, and I’m in these three classes and my fourth class is photography. And I thought, well maybe I can try to use photography as an outlet for all my frustration with the world and my frustration with cruelty and death and horror. I just wasn’t sure how I could do it.

And when I figured it out, I couldn’t even properly express it at critique the other day.

AWKWARD. I knew I was affected by my classes and I thought I’d be able to explain it without a problem and then Wednesday came around and my photos were up and I just…couldn’t. I actually physically was incapable of explaining my photos…well at least my banana photos. I had not expected that and I am really sorry. I suddenly became really choked up, my entire body was shaking and the words just would not leave my body. I was really taken off-guard by how physically I reacted to that. I guess I managed to squeak out “Well, these photos are really for me” and some other gibberish before I had to stop myself to prevent myself from bursting into tears.

And they are, completely, totally for me. I don’t expect necessarily for these to evoke anything in anyone else and if they do that’s awesome and if not, they were really a personal project and I’m happy with what they accomplished for me on a personal level in terms of my dealing with these overwhelmingly depressing subjects that I deal with 5-7 days a week, depending on how much homework I do over weekends.

And I know that fruit can in no way represent people, I understand that my representation of victims of genocide through fruit cannot possibly represent the magnitude of the horrors that actual human beings faced. And I also realize that just studying genocide can never make me understand genocide nor can my frustration from just studying it even begin to compare to the frustration and pain of those who actually lived it. That is incomprehensible to me and, god willing, it will forever remain incomprehensible to me.

Back on track…

Fruit! Why not do it through fruit, right? Fruit is so expressive for me…I don’t know what my thing is with fruit but it just feels right to me and it’s something I feel I can express myself through.

I hope my images don’t offend; my friend seemed to think they might but my intention wasn’t to offend, it was to vent, it was my own cathartic expulsion of these thoughts that haunt me.

I’m sorry this entry is a little more…it’s a lot more depressing than my others. Here I’ve been taking these classes where there just seems to be no hope and I have all these happy photos. The thing is that there is hope in these classes; I’m just at a point in them where I can’t seem to escape the oppressing thought that this is humanity; this cruel, manipulative, repulsive treatment of others based on a perceived difference is humanity.

I hope that isn’t true. I hope there is more curiosity, friendship, love, hope, strangeness, goofiness, anything that maybe some of my other photos have captured (or attempted feebly to, they are such strong emotions, after all).

Wow, this feels like an ultra-lame downer post…ummm, I’m sorry? I’ll post a happy one next time?

I crushed an orange with my foot and took photographs. I don’t know how I feel about them as photographs, only that they were well worth taking for my own sake.

The photos I took of the bananas were my real project though. I’m not sure what I was going for at first, only that I came back to this death march through the snow I was just reading about in a memoir. How you can just become completely desensitized to your surroundings in these horrific situations. I mean, how can you not? If you have to witness these horrors every day for years how could you not let yourself become desensitized? You would go mad if you didn’t. My first photo I was trying to capture this, I’m sure you can only see it with the explanation, and even then maybe it’s something only I see. But anyways, the bananas worked well for this shoot, just because they have that kind of slumped look, exhausted, shoulders sagging kind of look. Sagging but still determined to survive, not giving up. Not to mention I had this rotten banana that I was able to use to kind of be the body on the side of the road, a fallen companion, yet minimal reaction from those still marching.

My second photo was a much more painful process. We’ve been learning about gas chambers in our most recent Holocaust classes. I had initially just planned on having the stripped bananas standing in a line. Bananas don’t like standing in line. They don’t like to stand at all, actually, especially after having their peels removed. They actually like to turn into piles of mush that get all over your hands and slide down your background. Anyhow, I ended up getting them to stay still for five seconds and decided that I was actually more intrigued by their peels. I set the discarded pieces of “clothing” up in the foreground, set a low f/stop and allowed the line of bananas to disappear into some unknown in the back.

Well to not be too much of a downer, I was reading a Holocaust memoir recently and found that you can find, even in the most dismal of situations, a fragment of hope. Even if I don’t see it right now, I hope that as the semester draws to an end I can start to see it more. This passage is when the girl is in a camp that is surrounded by an electrified fence:

“‘It won’t be long until our turn comes,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘Maybe it never will,’ I replied

‘You are silly!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do not tell me that you still hope.’

‘I do, and you do too!’ I snapped back. ‘If you did not, why wait? There it is.’ I pointed to the charged wire that ringed the camp.

She smiled wanly and walked away.”

From All But My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein, a Holocaust Survivor, page 196.

Yaaaaaaaay hope!

Promise my next blog entry will be less awkward.

Tarzan and Fruit Massacres

Apart from being overtired from preparing a presentation for my class today (that I didn't even present because we ran out of time, lovely), I am also in a smidge-tish of a rush as I don't have a car and therefore need to catch the consortium bus. Not a huge rush as I'm planning on catching the bus that arrives in an hour but at the same time I have other stuff that needs to get done before I leave for Holy Cross for the day to visit my friend Joey. In other words, if my blog this week isn't as excruciatingly wonderful as usual (read: shorter! huzzah!) I apologize.

I've been feeling particularly violent this week for whatever reason and have decided to take my aggression out on fruit. I collected a lot of fruit from the caf this week and have summarily planned their demise. A centrally planned fruit genocide, if you will. That's for next week though, for now, some nice, unharmed (if a bit lonely) happy fruit.





My friend handed me this apple and said "I thought you might like to photograph this"

What a doll, in fact, I greatly encourge the handing of anything to me if anyone has something they think I'd like to photograph...as long as it don't breathe...scratch that, I don't want any corpses...as long as it don't breathe and has never breathed

Anyhow, back to the photos. This is the proper order...actually you could make a story out of any order of these photos so use your imagination. I see it as "Lonely Apple" "Pathetic Apple" and finally "Happy Apple!" Only friend your own reflection, and then finally, meeting another apple. It makes me think of Tarzan a little bit, the Disney movie one...he's an outsider and doesn't understand why he's different. That works, Tarzan the apple. I really like using mirrors. I agree with Frank that maybe a seamless background would work better for the mirror photo. At the same time, I had a lot of fun making these images and I'm happy with them. I took a lot of photos...a lot...and I actually worked with the same model yesterday (with seamless background) and I've already taken a ton more. Tarzan will probably be spared in the fruit massacre that is to come.

Okay, that's all for today! Seriously, I got stuff to do, no time to spend an hour writing like I did last week.