My name is Guadalupe Alvarez. I often look at pictures on the internet for inspiration. Seeing photos from other people often inspires me to try new things, see new perspectives, discover new places, and impulses me to create new content. In this class I got introduced to Pinterest, a website filled with photos of all sorts. This website is designed to create collections of photos of your choice and to compile them in boards. This introduces the first project of the class, creating a board with photos that describe me or my work. I don't have a great background of knowledge to the arts. Sadly where I grew up I wasn't exposed to art content because there was not much support to the arts. I started getting introduced to all this artists and art works and all this kinds of art forms until when I moved to study here in the United States a couple years ago. For that reason I based my Pinterest board on things that interest me, experiences that I've had and memories that I don't want to forget. The images that I choose describe the interests that I have, places that I want to travel, things that I want to try, & dreams that I want to accomplish. The main topics are music, road trips, archeology, astronomy, history, books, films and of course photography.
Response to James Wolcott article “Me, my Selfie, & I”
In the James Wolcott article he is expressing his opinion that the selfie is having a negative impact on our culture. But in his argument he is mainly focused on the bad habits and bad uses of the selfie. He argues about the lack of respect of taking selfies everywhere and captioning them without really paying attention to the meaning of specific sites. But instead of criticizing he could’ve added solutions to the arguments he was stating. For example when taking a selfie there are many different point of views, different ages, different backgrounds that would define how the person decides to take his or her photograph. Is pretty clear the risks of sharing or now even taking certain content because of the lack of privacy that the new technologies have. Knowing the risks and dangers of the media there is a necessity to teach young people to know the consequences of its bad use. He is trying to say that are times when taking a selfie is not respectful, and to be more careful on what are you taking because you’ll never know if you are going to offend/harm someone or even yourself. Wolcott is generalizing the selfies as bad thing that becomes a bad habit and in his opinion it should disappear. I disagree with that because since this is the big boom of the selfie we still don’t know what direction this habit of taking and sharing is going to take. It all depends on how the person taking the selfie is.
Selfie Video
[I had technical difficulties uploading the video file to this website. I've attached some stills from the video.]
Me, My Selfie and I Critique
All the past process lead to this final project. Creating photographs that represent me. I decided to have my guitar in the center because music is my passion and it creates harmony in what I do. My bag that contains a camera, a book, paper and a pen to represent my ways of documenting. The Nat Geo's magazines the inspiration. On the top right corner, objects that I buy and collect from places that I've been (In this case objects from Mayan places). The two photos from the right corner, represent the use of photographs to document. One photo was taken in 2010 and the other one four years later.
The feedback: The feedback I received from my class mates in response to my five images were that firstly, the sizes of my images and the different sizes of the borders created distraction and it didn't look professional. They also detected that my photos had a similar perspective and that I didn't tried different angles to have more variety. The last thing they talked about my photographs was that I needed to work on my printing skills. I printed them on the dark room and I am not too familiar with the process and the how to get specific looks on my photos, and I admit they were lacking on contrast and I didn't get pure darks or whites in most of them.
Responding to the instructor questions.
What specific events lead you to the medium of photography? How are these events related to the way you make your images? you talk about specific image or images from your family albums a bit more at length - what specifically attracts you to the image or image?
I love to hear stories about the past, and what attracts me to the images is to see how time passes changing everything. With photography (or video) we have a beautiful way to preserve memories. Looking at the albums gave me ideas to start documenting my life or others. I remember thinking of what if in the future someone is like me (curious about the past or stories) and sees an album created by me. Would the paths that I’ve taken inspire the person? The places that I’ve been? My life in general? Also, there are so many memories, experiences, lessons, (not only mine but from others too, specially from older persons) that are meant to be documented. If we don’t do something to conserve them and pass them on to other generations, then who will? (Back then, even though I didn't know if I was able to take photographs) I guess the reason that I started liking photography was because of the idea of documenting, sharing & conserving.