Video Response- Anisha Lall

Both the interviews with Brandon Stanton and the IIT Institute of Design touched on the importance of the subject and emphasized on telling their stories to the greatest accuracy possible.  In the beginning of Stanton’s interview, he placed a particular stress on the individual and the need to separate their personal stories from a grander over-arching theme. Personalization of stories are what make them unique and their independence from the larger society keep their individual meanings alive. However, while he doesn’t do so himself, it’s very difficult to ignore the context of the story and acknowledge its relevance to the rest of society. As the concept of the “social imagination” explains, society influences the individual and the individual contributes to society. After all, its individual people who make up a society and their differences are what construct the grounds for the tugs and pulls of a population. This begs the question of how does one tell the tale of a single person while taking into account the context to which it exists, but still treating it independent of it?

Moreover, Stanton mentions the need to get down to the realistic stories of his subjects rather than their “pre-constructed answers.” While I do understand the necessity of doing so especially when your work is renowned, but doesn’t that counteract placing control in the hands of the individual? If you want to take the person’s responses at face value, doesn’t it require some level of subjectivity to dictate whether they’re saying what they are in order to get more recognition and likes or if they actually do mean it? And so, wouldn’t that in some way be indirectly connecting someone’s response to a subjectively universal understanding of society and the people in it? To possibly counter some of that subjectivity, one can turn to ethnographic work such as participant observation as touched on by the IIT interview.

In addition, I found the part about letting the subject choose the place to be interviewed because it can say a lot about what and where they find comfort. This is something that has never crossed my mind, but is very relevant to any subject matter because as stated in the video, the more your subject is comfortable with you, the information you can get.