Brain Fitness Final Debriefing

     Well, our last meeting with the lovely people at Brain Fitness Club has come and gone, and I can't help but feel rather disappointed that our time with them is done. I really felt like I learned a lot and remembered a lot of very important things during my visits.

   Though I only had a very brief time with P, talking and interacting with another person, from a different generation, and who is very similar to myself was a great experience. It was a bit difficult trying to keep a conversation going since both of us are reserved, but to find out that we shared a love for art really made my day. Mostly, it was heart-warming to see and hear all about his family and how they meant everything to him.

      Our visits also sparked some meaningful memories within me. In high school I was apart of a service club and even president for one year. Our club would often collaborate with the local Rotary Club, attend their meetings, do jobs together, and etc. It was there that I learned how important and fun conversations with strangers can be. Just a simple hello, a smile, a handshake can create a life long connection that can have a huge impact on ones life. Since I'd come to college, I'd forgotten about that.

     Going along with this subject, I never really realized how much of an impact I was having on the members of Brain Fitness by just talking and making a book for them until, some one told me about P's progress at home, and again at our final meeting. Just seeing the smiles of gratitude from all parties involved, really struck a cord with me. 

      

PhotoBook Research: French Broad River, Jeff Rich

For this project, I did research on the photobook French Broad River by Jeff Rich. Rich quite often tackles issues related to water and environmental conservation, and this book most certainly embodies both of those aspects. My favorite quotation from this book is from Regional historian, Wilma Dykeman, “When we turned away from the spring at the edge of the kitchen yard and turned on the faucet in our porcelain sink, we turned off our interest in what came out of the spigot.” This line not only harshly implicates the industries that are the overbearing polluters of our waterways, but the common man who allowed them to exist and persist in their wrong doings.

Every image is displayed on the right side page, coupled with an almost entirely blank page to the left, which has a thin line of text; the name of the piece and where it was shot. By doing this, I believe that Rich was placing a specific importance on every single one of his photographs. By having an almost blank page, he elevates the attention paid to the photograph. Also, there is a huge symbolic significance to the fact that the picture is at our right hand; like our hand, the picture is the dominant force in the book, and thus seen as the most important part.

The book as a whole is filled with mixed images of factories, dams, and mills on the river, but also a great deal of residences and communal lands are sprinkled with in. At first glance the theme seems simple enough: “Factories evil; water good.” However, upon reading the passages in the front and back of the book, it made sense to me. As the quote above said, we are all to blame for the destruction of our waterways. The factories shown in the images appear dark and menacing, and distract from the river they sit on like they don’t belong there; they are clearly the predominant evil. But with the images containing normal townspeople, though the water looks cleaner, they seem just as guilty looking at the camera with remorse and shame almost.

While this book does indeed show the terrible deeds done to the French Broad River Watershed, it is also a positive beacon to what a community can do when they work together. Towards the end of book, it was brought to light that the reason most of the river is now clean and is being cleaned is that all the communities that live on the watershed were fed up their polluted homes and so they joined forces and succeeded in getting numerous laws passed locally and nationally to reduce and/or eliminate the emissions from the plants and mills. So while the people living on the watershed are just as guilty for the past pollution, by rejuvenating the  “life-cycle” or the river, they are also its savior.

Brain Fitness Debriefing # 8

My Brain Fitness visits have been different as of late, mostly because P left the program. So I didn't post last time because there was nothing to post really. But this time around, it was much more eventful. What with the flu flying around, there happened to be a bunch of members without their students, which meant that we grouped up and had a nice round table discussion about ourselves. Where we were from? What we did or are doing? What are our plans for the future? Normal, first time meeting each other topics. But then we started to dig deeper, talk  about our photo projects and how working with another person was, what classes at Rollins affected us the most and from there we talked on an on, back and forth. So it was just a real pleasure just to have that conversation.

Blurb Reading

Upon reading this exerpt, I was immidiately reminded of everything we've been going over in class about our photobooks. Put it together physically, what story are you trying to show? Figure out how your images work together, and so on. We've gone over it so many times that I feel like Im being nagged while reading this. Although reading the same ideas can become really annoying, I have to concede that those ideas are incredibly important and hard to put into practice so we have to be harped on it so much. Every single detail you put into a photobook should reflect your intent and something as simple as font style and size can change the aesthetics greatly. Howevef there were some ideas that didnt cross my mind until I read this, like creating a sketch booklet and scanning the images into my final.

Photo Series

There are times when I encounter those who really don't "get" sports, they have their own priorities and they simply can't imagine why athletes would put themselves through such duress just for a game. An athletes reasons are tested at around the age of middle school, or at least for female athletes. It's a time filled with stigmas, it's the time when things in sports really start to pick up, and many young and talented ladies choose to abandon the sport because they feel they need more time for "normal" activities. With these photos, I am attempting to illuminate why and what we athletes sacrifice for our sport. I organized them in a mirrored fashion to connect non-athletes to athletes. There really isn't any deeper meaning to them, just look closely and the idea will be clear.

1.Many young ladies put a high value on their physical appearance, some are even terrified to leave their room with out make up. But with athletes, we don't stress so much about our looks when we leave for a game. We are going out there to play in the dirt, rain or shine, not get complements on our perfectly trimmed eyebrows. Due to the continuous exposure, you can see the effect it has on the body; the skin becomes dryer, courser, your face ages from the sunlight, and there are so many more changes going on below the face that people can't see beyond the uniform.

2.Other people always seem to have time to efficiently study and get proper sleep. Well, athletes are constantly juggling school work and sports and more often than not, they have hardly the time get a good night's sleep, let alone study. Even though we are tired physically and mentally, we continue on.

3. The media has made Prom and other similar events, seem like the best night of our lives, it is a must go. Consequently, it is many girls dreams to go to Prom dressed like a princess and doing whatever you want for one night. For many athletes, these events are an impossibility as games always seem to fall on the same day. We trade our flowing gowns for worn uniforms. But honestly, when I actually managed to go to Prom one year, I kind of wished I had a game because this experience wasn't as thrilling or fun as playing with my teammates.

That's the overall heart and why to why we athletes give up your "normal" for our "normal". We don't push ourselves till we throw up, or get scrapes, or miss out on fun events because we enjoy it. We do it because going out there with a group of your very best friends playing a game you all love, is something that you'd trade most anything for.

Lucida Excerpt

Today, our world is saturated with photographs, many of them come at us so quickly we haven't the time to stop and think about how this image appeals to us. We scroll through Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat and more, endless streams of photographs; and what do we gain from it. As Lucida described in this excerpt, what we get is a constant feeling of "studium", that state of when you look at a photo and you like it or you don't and it really doesn't reach further inside of you than that. When Lucida began to describe this, I immediately connected with it, and kind of had an "ah ha" moment. As a child of the digital age, I experience this event on the daily, I never knew what name to tie to the numbing pleasure I get from social media, but now I do. But upon this realization, I became kind of disappointed in our society for not wanting to view the more provocative photography the world has to offer, the pictures that strike us at our soul and really hit us hard, the "punctum." But then, the author clarified that studium is not the enemy of punctum but rather they are two sides of the same coin that create a whole. Studium presents itself first and gives the viewer the general awareness of the situation. While punctum, when it does appear, provides a pin point of detail that illuminates the entire image further.
As an artist this excerpt has given me another aspect to think about: whether or not, I choose to include a piece of punctum in my work, and if I do, the subject of punctum I choose can drastically affect my intent. It can tell if I was really "there" with this piece.

Brain Fitness Debriefing 6

So as P could not make it this week,  I got the chance to meet yet another wonderful member of the Brain Fitness Club whose partner was also out named L. She was very nice and to the point,  she shared with me some of her more treasured items which were all very gorgeous.  Then I showed her photographs that I found in my family's archives. Most of them pictures of my mother,  grandmother, and great-grandmother when they were much younger, but some were of family members that I had never even met,  or knew their names. L took an interest in the photographs,  saying that I should find out the story behind those photos and I suppose that's a really great idea for the future.