Filed under: Photo Portfolio & Critical Review
For my portfolio I decided that instead of photos, I would take a second long video of a moment from each day, every day. I chose to approach the project from this angle because I’ve been really into movies lately and wanted to explore the medium of film for myself. I also had listened to an episode of TED Radio Hour, a podcast I like where they talked about memory and how we perceive time in our lives. In the episode they interviewed a guy who had created this app to record a one second video everyday. He created it because he was thinking back on the last 5 years of his life and could remember the big moments and specifically fun times but couldn’t remember what his life had been like on a day to day basis. This got me thinking about how I thought about and remembered the past few years of my life, years where a lot of things changed from year to year and even from month to month. Coming home from the city some weekends, I walk through my house and catch whiffs of certain smells that bring tears to my eyes. It doesn’t feel the same anymore, I strain to remember what my life was like here, how I spent my days and time when I wasn’t at school. I have a hard time recalling anything minute. So since I’ve downloaded this app in the beginning of the year I’ve been trying to record a second everyday. Sometimes I forget but I don’t beat myself up for it, I have a good amount of footage now. I spent a few months this year travelling around Europe and the Middle East and it’s really cool having small moments recorded from then. A year ago I was living in Prague, Czech Republic on my own. It was really hard at first to learn how to fill my days with things that made me happy, but I really learned how to push myself out of my comfort zone and do things I enjoyed. The whole time I was there feels kind of like a blur at this point and I wish I had had this technique to remember what I had done most days. I think this says a lot to me regarding the power of capturing moments in photography. When I show people my full video of all my one second moments from the last year I think that Roland Barthes’ element of studium grabs their attention, they notice the bursts of live music, the sound of rain, or the images from a particularly interesting scene. For me, watching these videos is so much more, the punctum really reaches out to me. I can feel like I’m back in the reality of when the video was taken, if only for a second. When others see my videos, I’m not sure if they’re just appreciating them for their aesthetic value, or if they’re really appreciating them as small proofs of my existence. Then I think, am I just capturing these moments to create something that looks nice, simply capitalizing my existence, or is this really an exercise in logging my experience so that I don’t forget? What would be so bad about forgetting?
In my actual clips, I chose subjects that stood out for me, things that brightened my day and made me think. Like when the train passing your train is on a different track and starts going uphill and you can see the people whose lives were parallel to your own depart from you at once. A lot of shots on me riding my bike around the city because it makes me feel free and the most happy. Two dads pushing their kids and playing around, bumping their strollers into each other. Lots of clips of events that I’ve gone to where I’ve met some nice people and learned some new things. A few days that I went up to Massachusetts, which even though it isn’t in New York City I decided to include because I felt that it represented an important contrast and shift in my mind, seeing the way my best friends are experiencing their new lives in college. I don’t know if I was really trying to convey anything in particular with my photos, just trying to document my life and what made me stop and think. Although, probably subconsciously I was thinking about what scenes would look interesting or cool. When I think back, there are actually a good number of moments that would look really cool but I forgot to take videos of. I’m glad however that the urge to capture a moment didn’t interrupt my actual living of it. Individually these clips work as a kind of moving photograph for me, but altogether they make up a month of my life, and I’m glad to have recorded it.
all of my clips from the past 2 months in NYC: IMG_5918.MOV
all of my clips from my last year (if you’re interested): IMG_5924.MOV
