“I have no need to question my feelings in order to list the various reasons to be interested in a photograph.”(19). Like Roland Barthes’ said a photo we take brings certain emotions to us whether it is happy or sad. We all feel some type of way. We don’t need to explain to people why we took it or what it means to us. When looking at a house is the house all you see? Is it a big house? Some say yes, while others say no. But that is not the most important idea. Just like people, what matters is on the inside. For instance, what’s on the inside of my house that matters most to me, is family. When looking inside my house I am positive all you see is furniture, rooms and more than likely dog hair. Having two big dogs that shed a lot calls for constant dog hair everywhere! But they are very much apart of my family as anyone else. As we all know sadly they do not last forever, the dogs we have now are our second set of labs. Just like families that grow and change, as do houses. I have been lucky enough to live in my house for my whole life, going on 22 years now, not many people can say that. Of course my house has changed throughout the years and I’m not just talking about the color of paint on the wall or some new furniture, but the family inside it as well. The most important parts of my house would be the kitchen, the living room and the dining room. They hold the most memories.

The kitchen which has however had a lot of physical changes over the years, it use to be all closed off. After some remodeling, it is now open concept. Which coincidentally, over the years my family as a whole has become more open amongst each other as well. From going through hardships with our immediate family, our extended family hardships and drama and simply life throwing curve balls at us. We have come out on top and from that our relationships have flourished and we have no secrets; not many families can say that. I hold that near and dear to my heart. Growing up my family would always eat dinner together every night, when my father got home from work and my siblings and I had finished homework we would sit down at the kitchen table in a circle and talk about our day. Now we are lucky if we get at least one full family dinner every couple of months (excluding holidays). Usually my parents always eat dinner together and it is either one of my siblings or maybe two of us on a good day. It just seems to happen in the blink of an eye, and you don’t even tend to realize. I know at first I didn’t. It took my dad throwing out comments to us about never being home to realize all the things we use to do together and now we don’t. Which is normal in life, we all grow up, some traditions get left behind and new ones form.

The second room in our house that gets the most use out of it is the living room. The living room has always been the room in our house that sees the most love, by that I mean actually witnessing love from people. Our house has an open door policy; we always have our front door open to anyone who wants to come in. Looking back at my friends and even some family and they don’t have that policy which is kind of weird to me just based off my own personal experience. As soon as you walk in the front door to the left is the living room so naturally everyone just tends to end up in there. Growing up it use to always just be the adults talking in there (on any day, or a family get together or even a party) us kids would be down stairs playing with the Wii or Xbox or with toys. We would always here the adults laughing and just having such a good time; it was very heart warming. As we got older however, we get to be around and listen to the “grown ups” conversations and hear stories from their childhood that we never heard before, so it’s really nice. It is cool to get a second look at your parents or even your aunts and uncles and realize that they are real people who made mistakes in their time too, or that their lives weren’t always rainbows and unicorns. Also when I think about this room I think about Christmas. My family always puts the Christmas tree in this room with the big picture window to show off. But also this room brings me so much joy just thinking about all the family that gathers for Christmas. We didn’t always use to have my moms family over for Christmas, maybe the last 7 years we have and the number of people has begun to shrink. It’s crazy to think that the cousins I grew up with are now married and having kids. Mostly it’s sad that we don’t really get to get together as often anymore. The majority of my cousins who are married and have kids either switch off every other year coming to our family for Christmas or just do it with their immediate family. Today I think everyone is just so use to change and just going with the flow that often times we forget to look back at how things use to be and acknowledging the change.

The dining room holds just as many memories. I never noticed that not all houses have a dining room. Not that we particularly use it, only for holidays or special occasions. However that is what makes it so special that it is not commonly used. So you hold those memories closer to your heart, at least I do. When my siblings and I were younger my parents would use the dining room to have candle lit dinners, for birthdays or just a random occasion to switch things up. Growing up money was tight and it’s hard for a family of five to go out to dinner, that’s a lot of money. So I think that was part of the reason for having more random dinners in the dining room aside from holidays. Now a days we have Christmas day at our house with my moms side of the family so we use the dining room table for people to sit at and that’s the only use that table gets. Even though we don’t use the dining room as a family as we use to, whenever my brothers, my parents or I sit there the very first question is “What’s the occasion?” we just get so caught up in routine that we never really think about the things that we do, or the lack there of.

“…all photographs whose principle (or better whose alibi) is ‘shock’; for the photographic ‘shock’ (quite different from the puntcum) consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it.”(32). So often we just look at what we know and what we don’t know. We always just look at the bigger picture and not what is behind it. It’s the little things that mean the most that we don’t pay attention to.

Works cited

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography. 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, pp. 16-59 Composition Flipped, writing 101.net/flip/wp-content/resources/documents/camera_lucida_excerpt.pdf