Pictures of a forget familiar place

In our everyday lives we become absorbed in the normality of routines. In Camera Lucidia Mr. Roland talks about a magazine picture, about how a scene that should shock someone doesn't excite him. He states "Did this photograph please me? Interest me? Not even simply. He just existed"(8). This quote to me stands out because in our daily lives we don't see the things that are around us when we stuck to the same path. As the quote show everything around us just exists. Always following the same paths, very rarely detouring off the beaten path. Like smelling something familiar sent over and over again, we become blind to the things we pass everyday. The things that become a blur that we are familiar to can end up changing and we wouldn't notice. In my life I go to school and work at the school, the school itself has become familiar to me. I take the same path to classes and I take the same path to go to work at the school. So for this project I decided to take pictures of my school's campus because for me it has become a familiar place that I have became blind to.

What I noticed over the last week and a half is the student life. At Moraine Valley the paths can be packed with people all doing their own things, hanging with their own people, or doing activity's in the field. Ranging from playing football to just relaxing before their next class or working on their homework assignments. But it can also be a lonely place where, during rain, cold, or fog, people end up avoiding the paths and retreating to the comfort of the inside instead. This leaves the usually busy paths of the campus feeling lonely and empty. For my pictures I decided to go with this approach, the idea that the familiar, people doing things and being active, to the unfamiliar of people not being around, and the overall campus feeling empty. The pictures I took are representative of the path I take everyday, I very rarely go off that path. What I see everyday is people just walking from building, place to place, class to class.

On my normal observations there seems to be multiple people going on their journey, just passing through life. When I started using my camera to see, I started to notice small details that I missed initially. Like people gathering to play football in the fields, or people just socializing on the path. Using the camera allowed me to see the familiar in a new light. After seeing some of the things I missed it makes me wonder what other things I have missed in my short time at Moraine. The experiences I missed out on because I failed to see things that I would of noticed if I wasn't so used to my normal routines everyday. This makes me wonder what I have missed through my life with other experiences? What new adventures I missed out on because I was used to the normal routine of going to school and going to classes. At the time that was my normal routine, that was the life I was used to and would experience everyday. The world around me was a blur back than as it is now. We are taught that in life we need to stop for a moment and absorb the world around us. The pictures I have taken are similar but also different from the world I thought I lived in initially than what it truly is. It became something that, to me, felt both familiar unfamiliar and this idea is something that would irk me throughout this processes. Things that I thought were the same all the time were, and things that I expected wouldn't change did.

This idea is shown through not only the kids on the path but some time the activity's that would pop up out of the blue. At my college there a lot of buildings, each one adding their own thing to the overall college. Whether the building is designed to show off the schools art, the technology etc. etc. Each building impacts students lives daily whether on purpose or subconsciously. In my daily life I go through D building, a hub for students looking for social contact, a packed library full of kids cramming in the last of their notes they needed to study for their classes and tests that they are about to run late for. A store where you can buy products from the school showing your school spirit. Or if you need to you can stop for a moment and buy yourself some food for a boost in energy for the next 2 hour long lecture. All these factors add to the over all importance of the the construct of d building. This impacts me as a student because it shows me how hard students work at this school. Spending their time studying hard before a next class where in high school I was used to people hanging out and not really caring what they got on tests or homework assignments. Not only does it show me that aspect of students but it also shows me the social aspects of people in this school. It shows me that people are happy hanging around and just talking with one another instead of just being on their phones constantly in a age where peoples lives become more virtual than it does physical. From D building I go to A building where I see people learning multiple different things. This gives me a idea of the dedication of the students here, in high school I had to deal with people that didn't care about classes and would goof around during them. But at Moraine I don't see that and it gave me more of a idea once I started looking at everything through a different lens. In the cafeteria is where people really come together, in the cafeteria people go their to socialize and take a break from their busy lives. They go their to relax and slow down and take a look at life. Similar to this project this is where people go to slow down and just take in everything life has to over, including the food. This is one of the buildings I go sometimes to get a different pace than what I usually do to get a glimpse at things I don't really get to see too often. This helps me get a grasps of where the social life happens usually. The camera in the end gave me a better view of what life is like when you slow down and breathe in the areas around you and really just absorb everything. It gives you a better perspective on things that you have previously missed out on and gives you a more wider spectrum on things that you were probably blind on missing. It shows you the culture, the setting, and everything that things you previously missed can offer you. It also helps that the area I was studying is a booming hub of people but that is the aspect I didn't want to focus on I wanted to focus on the stranger side of the campus. The side where a lot of the things I previously described aren't present, the rawness of the school that most people don't get to see too often. this is the reason I chose to take the pictures I did, to make a area that is already unfamiliar to me unfamiliar to anyone else that is used to the area better than I am. To conclude taking the pictures gave me a overall sense of knowing the area that was unfamiliar to me become more familiar and for that I am grateful.