Seeing is not enough

Looking for a familiar place to photograph is like trying to find something you lost, you know where it is but don’t. These locations you pass through a thousand times, but have you ever stopped to think about them? You get a whiff of a familiar scent or see something that shows you where you are. The location of this photograph may show something unknown to the naked eye.

Many of the locations in my photographs are a representation of myself. I see them but never notice what fills them. I don't drive down a road to look at every building I pass and never do the same in my house. These roads and rooms impact my life more than I know. Looking back at them, I understand how these areas in my life impacted me.

My house is the most important location in my life, it’s where I feel the safest and where I grew up. I used to hate being in it; I loved to hang out with my friends that all lived on the block. Every weekend I would have a sleepover at one of their houses, I never cared to be at my house because all of my friends never wanted to be there. My parents and brother are cigarette smokers and my friends have always disregarded my house because of the smell. After entering high school I never left it if it did not have any relation to my education or family. I lost my friends because I went to a different high school, and my house became the place where I can talk to others without leaving. Entering a new school made me want to stay inside and made me not want to leave my safe space.

I look outside whenever I am bored. I see the street sign and my front lawn but I also fail to see everything else. I now see what has changed over the past four years of being looking outside of my house. We used to have three huge trees that would shade me in the summer. As I broke down this image further, I saw the history of my street. The neighbors that passed away and all the times I walked around it while hanging out with my friends.

As we look inside my house, you see controlled chaos.We have not cleaned the rug since my high school graduation party and as a result, it's a mess. But as I think about the history like the outside, I see the true story. If you looked at a photo of the inside of my house a couple of years back, you would think you were looking at a different house. Over the years, my parents have painted our living room and put in new furniture to modernize the appearance. I angled the photo to make it look awkward to the viewer like how it looks to me. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida manifests the meaning of a photograph, showing us the punctum and stadium. Barthes wrote, “Ultimately, Photography is subversive nor when it frightens, rebels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” (38). I do my photos to have the reader and viewer think, like in this image. You don't know who lives here or why anything is in its current location. I do not see the awkwardness of my house. I think people see the house as people see me. Even though I’m six foot three, I have always thought people see me as awkward, similar to how I see the inside of my house. Recognizing this has shown me how I think about myself. I established a neurotic personality while growing up inside this house, and it has affected how I think of myself. My overly anxious feelings may be a result from sheltering my thoughts about myself without seeking other people’s thoughts first.

Education has taught me a lot more about people than the subjects I have learned. I go outside to further my education and to hang out with friends, not much else. I took the image in the dark to signify my amount of knowledge about the outside world, whether it be it people or my education. But as I look further I see how the image races forward, frantically going somewhere. This is how I see myself as I always rush to school even though I will make it to class twenty minutes early. But also what I do not notice when everything goes fast. I forget people's names if they aren't important and I don't notice my best friend's feelings and emotions. Everything outside is weird to me because I don't like to spend my time outside. Even the activities I like are inside, for instance, wrestling and video gaming. The person I am from this is an indoor one because I don't enjoy being outside, and when I am outside I try my best to go back inside. Barthes wrote “Very often the Punctum is a ‘detail’, i.e., a partial object. Hence, to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself” (43) The computer screen is not the punctum of the photograph or the focus I am trying to show. Being inside my room on my computer has to be one of my favorite parts of my day. I look at this photograph and remember all the great times being in five hour voice chats with my best friends, or playing competitive video games to get better at them. I don’t even have to do anything to get this feeling. When I am at my computer I can read books, watch videos, and play games. These give me personal satisfaction that I rarely get anywhere else. While Barthes also wrote, “The studium is a kind of education (knowledge and civility, "politeness") which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions which establish and animate his practices, but to experience them in reverse, according to my will as a Spectator” (28). Looking at the image you see my computer screen and my gaming keyboard and mouse. I have a mechanical keyboard and mouse to increase my performance like a professional athlete will with shoes and equipment. Aside from the obvious in the image, you might see that my mouse pad and computer screen are on a weird angle. This is a habit of mine from playing various games and has become the norm when I do anything on my computer. What you don't see is the hours I have spent looking at my computer. Most of my time spent on my computer relates to having fun than working on assignments for school. I feel stupid that I have spent so much of my life doing nothing that could have been spent studying or working out.

Very early on, I thought of how to represent the connection between place and mind. Barthes said, “In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it” (20). I am outside my house looking into my room, showing just how simple the room I grew up in is. Looking inside my house, I see how boring my room looks like. Being a very light green, it looks like a kid’s room more than a college student’s room. And all the hats hanging up, I have never worn them since 8th grade. My room is trapped in 2014 while its 2019. Because I have no one come inside my room besides my parents and brother, I have never needed to change the looks of it to fit my age. The last time I had anyone over to hang out in my room was before entering high school, aside from my computer and a few trophies, my room has not changed. While being on the inside of the room, I feel much different. All the things I do in this room, be it sleep, eat, read, or play video games all feel normal and relaxed. These experiences from an outsider’s view all look routine, but I never saw this view before.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard, Hill & Wang, 1980, pp. 16-59. Composition Flipped, writing101.net/flip/wp-content/resources/documents/camera_lucida_excerpt.pdf.