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.