Professor Prabal De, CCNY 2014
Casey Bolles
This user hasn't shared any profile information
Posts by Casey Bolles
Harlem Walking Tour
010 years
I thought the Harlem tour was pretty enlightening, because I didn’t realize how close we live (all of us in the towers, at least) to such important historical sites. Since coming to New York, it’s always been a shock for me to see things I’ve only seen in movies or read about. For example, Times Square, Central Park, and Washington Square all initially felt like I was walking into a frame of some movie I had just seen. I had a similar feeling when on the tour, especially recalling a book I read in high school for Lit, “Invisible Man.” This book tells the story of a nameless narrator living through the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement, becoming an influential orator, but eventually fading into obscurity. Not even just the people mentioned, but some of the areas we walked through were mentioned in the narrative and were even main plot points. The most interesting thing about the tour was the fact that Langston Hughes’s ashes are in the library, the first building we saw. That particular fact stuck with me through the rest of the tour, because he was such an influential poet and is so ingrained in US literary history. I also found it incredible that he was laid to rest in the same building that initially stunned him as he walked out of the 135th street subway station. I’m grateful to be able to live in such a historically important place, especially so important in recent US history.
Eyes On Bangladesh
010 years
My favorite part of the Eyes on Bangladesh exhibition was the first series by Munem Wasif, entitled “Belonging.” I thought this was interesting because the themes he mentions in his writeup along with the context Professor De gave are readily apparent in many aspects of the works displayed. Overall, the arrangement of the photos was different than the other series because rather than relying on a linear arrangement or one with some sort of progression or distinct uniformity, they were scattered in a chaos mimicking that shown in the pictures themselves, yet there was a definite center, where the photographs became more dense. I think this idea of chaos around a center is related to the theme of belonging. The type of belonging discussed in the writeup next to the series is community––many parts comprising a whole, each part not necessarily needing to be uniform to fit together.
The pictures themselves are interesting as well in that they play off of stark contrasts in light, which is accentuated by the greyscale color scheme. If you look at some of the examples below, you can see that each photograph uses light/dark contrast to accent some center. Wasif also uses lines to draw the eye to a center (like in the boat picture below.) Other than the content of the photos, this composition choice makes the them predominant through all aspects of the series. All the pictures I took have a glare on them, but ignoring that, notice the central object in all of the images.
Golden Venture Fades into Obscurity? – Casey Bolles
010 years
The most astounding thing about the Golden Venture, to me, was that I had never heard of it before. I thought that I would have learned about such a momentous trial regarding immigration sooner, but for some reason, Golden Venture is not part of contemporary vernacular. Maybe it’s because I’m not from the city, and people from here have heard of it, but the film provided all new information to me.
It seemed as though the lawyers for the Golden Venture passengers had all the odds against them, and if this documentary proves anything, it is that we need to relax the immigration laws for those seeking political asylum. People sent back to China were literally sterilized by their government. The US should have been more invested in the well being of people seeking their help. How does a nation justify policing the world and “helping”” when they’re not wanted, while they deny people who actually actively seek out their help?
I thought that the documentary was really well-done in that is was very cinematic. The use of actual footage paired with interviews of those involves made the climactic moments all the more nerve-wracking. The stats at the end of the documentary was an interesting way to end it, like a total count of everything that happened in the documentary. Theses stats surprised me as well because they reflected the sheer willpower of all the Golden Venture passengers, in that many of them survived a cramped boat trip for months on the Atlantic in miserable conditions, and then jumping into freezing cold waters from the massive vessel.
Casey Bolles – Joe Salvo’s Lecture
010 years
by Casey Bolles
in Blog posts
I live (what usually ends up being) a 9 hour drive away from New York City. Before September, I had no experience spending time in the City, and still haven’t really been in most of the boroughs, so Salvo’s lecture was particularly interesting to me. The statistics that most surprised me were the size of New York and its boroughs, and the migrations numbers. First of all, New York is larger than the next 3 biggest cities combined, and well over twice as large as LA, the second most populace US city. Also, holding the preconceived notions of an outsider, I had always assumed Manhattan was the largest borough, but both Brooklyn and Queens out-populate it. But the fact that Manhattan alone is bigger than a city as large as Philadelphia is incredible to me. The second fact I mentioned, total migration, also shattered some of my views as an outsider. Primarily, the concept that so many people leave the city to live elsewhere in the nation (many more than migrate to it) is incredible to me because, while I have only been here a few months, I can’t imagine wanting to leave unless it was to a foreign country. A final thing that I think will make this course particularly interesting to me, is that Buffalo is not very diverse or dynamic. This is not the case with New York.
