Who are you?

Who are you? That is a question most cannot answer without having thought about it for quite sometime. It requires a deeper thought into yourself to truly find out who you are. Not your age, what you look like, or your hobbies, but who you truly are on the inside as a human being. My teacher made this very clear to us on the first day of school. He asked a student "who are you?" and she struggled to come up with an answer for his question. It is very difficult to express who you are if you do not exactly know. As human beings, we are not always who we think we are. Influenced by different environments, most of us tend to change, or act differently when we are around certain situations. Whether this be because of people we do not know, a new school, or our best friends, we never appear to be the same person everywhere we go. When I was with my friends, I was always comfortable to act the way I please because I have known them for fifteen years, but around strangers, that changes drastically. I hid my personality until I was comfortable enough to show it. The thought of people judging me for who I was always lurked in the back of my mind every time I was around a group of people I did not know. This is the reason "who are you?" is complicated to answer because if you are influenced by different environments and never appear to be the same person, then who actually are you? Hiding who you are can be dangerous. It will lead you down a path where you will eventually never know yourself. It will make you question yourself and sooner than later, you will be looking in the mirror asking, "who am I?"

Susan Sontag, American writer, connects her writing with photography to have a much deeper meaning than simply taking a photo. "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge and therefore, like power" (Sontag 4). She believes taking a photo connects you with the world in a way that nothing else can. Photography can create and tell the story of someone. It can provoke emotion or capture a moment that the human eye cannot. Photography can capture a beautiful moment in someone's life, showing who they truly are, raw and unfiltered. This is the true meaning of photography.

Selfies are a way of capturing important or fun moments in life, like a concert, or a vacation. These pictures are taken without much meaning. It is kind of like documenting your life. They are photos to remember that moment, look back on, and to show family and friends. "Photographs furnish evidence" (Sontag 5). Sontag explains that photos were used as a tool for evidence by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June of 1871. We may not be using selfies for this exact reason, but it still allows us to capture evidence. It shows that we were at a certain place at a certain time. Selfies are not meant to have a deep meaning. The mystery behind selfies is that the person taking the photo might not be showing their true self. A selfie, although still being a photo of someone, can be deceiving and show a different side of that individual. A side that may not be true. "Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out" (Sontag 5). I believe this is when the true meaning of who you are gets taken out of the picture. When the picture is no longer a raw visual of who you are, it loses its true meaning. It is simply just a picture of yourself. This does not mean selfies are meaningless. They capture happy moments, fun times with friends and family, and even sad times. They show a public version of yourself. The pictures that are edited and changed up by the person who took them, are usually used for social media. Social media is something that influences us to although show who we really are, use a couple of filters along with it. My selfie is simply just a picture of myself at the gym. There is no special meaning behind it, just a picture of myself and what I do on a day-to-day basis. People who see this photo will still barely understand who I really am. From just looking at the photo, the only information people can gather from it, is that I like working out. They can see that this is my hobby and something that I love to do. This photo does not give the viewer insight as to why I began working out two years ago. It does not tell the viewer that I hated the way I looked, and that it has been my escape from reality at times. When life kicked me down, this was my way of getting back up. I was always super insecure from freshman to sophomore year. I was overweight and needed to change because I wasn't happy with how I looked. This picture hides all of the past struggles and the hard work I put in to get where I am at today. This photo can do nothing but simply showcase where I am at now, not how I got there. It can never tell the story behind my life. No photo can ever truly tell the story of your life, but self-portraits can give more depth as to who you are as a person. Self-portraits carry a certain meaning behind the photo. It is a much deeper meaning that a simple selfie can give. There is a story behind them that shows who someone is more in-depth than a selfie can. They are very transparent to the viewer and allows them to think deeper into the photo. Think of a self-portrait as your life on a canvas. Every detail on the photo, from the facial features, to the environment surrounding you, is correlated to something in your life. With these photos, there is no mask, no hiding behind a filter. It is YOU in raw, unfiltered form. My self-portrait is a photo of me at the place I love, doing what I love, with the people I love. It is my happy place, where I turn the world off and enjoy life. In this picture, I see more than myself. I see my Grandfather, the man who taught me everything I know about fishing. When I fish, the first thing that comes to mind is him. My portrait reveals that the little things in life don't matter to me. Time spent with my family in the place I love is most important.

Who are you? Dig deep and truly grasp your inner self. Do not let certain surroundings influence who you are as a person. Find who you are and stick with it no matter what. It's only a matter of time before you lose who you are as a whole. I know this because I speak from self experience in my own life. I didn't know who I actually was because of the different ways I acted around different people. I have since then changed. I realized life is too short to be worried about what others think of you. So, who are you?

Works Cited

Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, Dell Publishing, 1977, pp. 3-24. Composition Flipped, writing101.net/flip/wp-content/resources/documents/sontag-in-platos-cave.pdf.