A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
An Evaluation of Literacy and Justice through Photography 2nd Semester
By Eilidh
May, 2012
When I started this class, these were my goals:
Photography Goals:
• Personal- To have fun taking photographs, and to increase my skills at photography.
• Social- To hopefully capture some things through photography that I want to change about our world and by these photographs make people think about our world and things in it.
• Intellectual- By taking photographs of issues in the world, I want to think more about these issues myself and think about ways to fix them.
Creative Writing Goals:
• Personal- To improve my writing, and to get new ideas for stories or poems.
• Social- To share some of my writing, by this website, with others besides family and friends.
• Intellectual- To use my photographs to inspire me to write new things, about new subjects.
Did I complete my goals you may ask? I completed some of them but some are goals that I haven't done yet. For example, I haven't really done the goal of taking pictures of issues in the world and by doing that, educating myself about them, although if I do my Career Exploration passage on Global Warming I will probably use photography as a medium to educate others. I also don't think that I was inspired to write anything because of my photographs. Maybe that will happen someday but I didn't really get any ideas from taking photos. I did, however, share some of my writing (a color poem and a personal essay) with the world through my blog.
Another of my goals was to improve my photography skills. I'm not sure if I improved my photography skills. Practice makes perfect, so I'm probably gradually improving. I have definitely taken some pictures with human and animal subjects, which I didn't really do in Beginning Photography (a class I took first block). I also did some prompt photo shoots (like a color shoot and shooting pictures based off of a song).
Speaking of prompt photo shoots, I'll talk about each of the projects really quickly. One of the main parts of this class was to keep a blog onto which I posted every single assignment I did. Our very first assignment (naturally!) was to write goals for the class. I think that when I wrote those goals, I had taken the title of the class very literally (Literacy and Justice Through Photography). I think that I wanted to take meaningful photos of issues in our world. That's why I didn't complete many of my goals: I had a different idea of the class then what it turned out to be. But I still think it turned out to be a great class!
Anyway, after the goals we had our first photo shoot: a color photo shoot! The goal was to shoot 5 photos of objects/things in a color of your choice. Since it had just snowed outside, I decided to take pictures of all things white. We also wrote a color poem about the color of our choice. Because I love to write, this wasn't too hard for me to do!
Later on we began doing the body pictures and self-portraits. We made a list of words that describe us. Then we had to draw a picture of ourselves (I'm terrible at drawing) and label the parts of body with appropriate stories that involved them (things like how I got stitches on my left knee and how my hands help me to write). We then took a picture of our favorite body part. Now, let me admit something: I'm not sure if I actually have a favorite body part! Maybe my hands because they help me to do so many things. But my feet, the body parts that I took a picture of, are also very valuable to me. Without them I couldn't do half of the things I like to do! I took, therefore, a picture of my feet with my favorite nail polish that my dad got when we were in Florida. I also made two edited copies of that picture using PicNik.
Next up: Self-Portrait! All the examples Jen showed us were so good! I feel like my self-portrait wasn't half that good. I think it might be easier to take good pictures of other people than of yourself. Anyway, Mathara took a picture of me reading To Kill a Mockingbird, which reflects my love of reading. I also took a picture of my little sister dressed up for fun. I didn't know that we needed to take a self-portrait picture of another person when I took the picture of my sister. But before taking our self-portraits, Jen told us we needed to take someone else's self-portrait. When Mathara took my picture, I didn't really get a chance to take a picture of anyone else. So I just used the picture I had taken of my little sister! From taking that picture of my sister, I learned that using a camera flash with a wooden door as a background leaves a big mark (as seen if you go onto my blog!)
Our next writing project came after this. We had to write an auto-biography. Jen and Daisy gave us several options and I chose to write about my name. I feel like I did pretty well on that assignment. I am a writer, so writing that wasn't difficult or painful for me in the slightest.
Our most recent projects have been the 5 frame story, the music project and the final project. I used a fun subject for my 5 frame story: my little sister's cat, Tom Bombadil! He's an easy going, friendly cat: pretty much the weirdest and best cat you'll ever meet! I did a five frame story on what your cat does when you're not home, with a twist ending.
The music project is also a story of sorts. I took pictures for the song We're Going To Be Friends, by the White Stripes. I thought that it had lyrics that I could easily change into pictures. I took all the pictures, using my brother and sister as subjects: but never put it into a movie format with music behind it. My dad offered to help me do it on I-Movie so I'll probably do that this summer. It is the only thing not on my blog, but hopefully it will be sometime soon :)
For the final project we had a choice: we could take a story and change it into photos, we could write a story and take photos for it or we could write a photographic essay. I decided to do the very last final project. At first I wanted to do it on “A Day in Eilidh's Life”, but in the end I decided to do it on a Mother's Day excursion to go shoot archery.
From all of these projects, I have a few that I'm proud of. These include my color pictures, my final project and my auto-biography. But I also have some that I wish I'd done better on: my edited toes picture and my self-portrait (I might try to take better self portraits of myself this summer).
We put all of these projects up on each of our blogs. My blog is http://serendipityphotospoemsandstories.blogspot.com/. I think that blogging was an excellent and environmentally friendly way to document this class and keep track of work. We didn't kill trees or use a whole bunch of ink. It also made it extremely easy for Jen and Daisy to check up on our progress!
Speaking of Daisy, I'll tell you why she was checking our progress in the class. Teaching this class was part of Daisy's DOR on photography. I don't know much about her DOR besides that, so I'll talk about how Daisy taught. I didn't feel like she was really the main teacher of this class. It did feel like Jen was leading most of the time and that Daisy was kind of an assistant almost? She did things like drawing an example of the body picture with stories up on the board, giving Jen the links to websites and walking around to see if anyone had any questions. However, she also checked some people's websites to make sure that they had all the necessary projects on them. So while I didn't really get the impression that Daisy was the main teacher, she still was almost like an assistant teacher. I'm not sure which she was supposed to be.
One thing that was really interesting was that this class addressed literature through photography, combining them. Lately, I've seen dancing combined with writing and it's interesting to know how writing, in a way, can be combined with a lot of other art forms. Anyway, this class combined those two things through assignments. Sometimes, assignments were also just one or the other. I don't think that this class made me think differently about myself or about photography. But I did see that photography can tell a story: that pictures don't have to be just pictures. Also, pictures can both educate people and change the way people think about things.
To finish up, I'll talk about graduation expectations. This class addressed several graduation expectations, the main one being creative expression and the arts. Photography in itself is an art and somehow, since I've started JCOS, I've also started doing photography. I'm not sure if this will grow into anything but I might use photography to take pictures for my Global Awareness. I have taken some really good pictures (the color pictures, some of the archery pictures, Tom's pictures) in this class and hopefully my photography skills will get better over time.
I think this class also addressed the technological literacy graduation expectation: we made blogs and posted pictures to them. This was the first time I've used Blogger. The other technological stuff I learned how to do was how to download pictures onto my computer easily by using the camera's memory card. I also used PicNik to edit a photo.
The last two graduation expectations I think we addressed were writing and communication. Writing was an essential part of this class, especially with the auto-biography and the color poem. I'm already a writer, so I don't think I grew much in this portion of the class, but it wasn't difficult for me either. The communication graduation expectation was addressed through some of our photos. With some of our assignments, we had to communicate a story (five-frame story and photographic essay) without words to an audience. That takes a special skill, and it was interesting trying to figure out how to show a situation without words or with very few words.
This was a good class, incorporating two great art forms: literature and photography. I feel like I did a pretty good job in this class. I could have done some things better and I didn't finish the music project but overall my writing was good and many of my photographs were pretty good too. Thanks for showing me how easily writing and photography connect!
