Allebach+J+Wk+12

4/18/12

My original goal in this project was to collect images that signified my audience's normal and mundane day. I took audience into account and thought I would focus much of these images on the mundane day of a typical college student. Driving to school, doing homework, sitting in a classroom, etc. Then I decided that some of my classmates may also have to take on responsibilities during their day outside of school. Maybe they have a child, maybe they live at home and have to do chores like laundry or doing the dishes, maybe they have a part-time or full-time job and go to school, as well. As I thought about this, I decided I would add some more images depicting more variety in someone's "normal" or "mundane" day.

I want to start my presentation with a quote I once found that talks about how nobody appreciates a normal day until it is taken away. I think that it will set the foundation for the rest of my presentation. I then want to show a trail of photographs depicting the "normal days" as I mentioned above. These images will be quite familiar with the audience (or at least with some of them). They will connect to these images to some aspect of their life. Ramage talks about this in the first few chapters - rhetoric and the way an image is viewed and understood is always subject to the spectator's experiences, values, and ideas. So I'm hoping that my audience will be able to connect their experiences to these images. I want them to say "I can see myself in this image..." or "I just did that this morning or this afternoon..."

I then want to show photographs that symbolize the ruin of the previous images. For instance, there was a photograph of a girl washing dishes. Now there's a photograph of a girl with a broken arm, unable to wash dishes. There's a photograph of a frazzled mother changing a diaper, now there's a photograph of a mother staring at her child in the NICU. There's a photograph of someone driving to school or work, now there's a photograph of a car accident. These photographs act to defamiliarize the audience with the original photographs. They are seeing outside their own perceptions of the original scenes and seeing them in a new way: what if they were taken away from me?

I took quite a few of the images myself. These images were posed to create the scene that I wanted but as Morris states, I feel like it is OK to do this for artistic consumption. It is not supposed to be or supposed to represent photojournalism. I am arguing that my audience should value the mundane aspects of their day, because you don't realize the blessing of them before they are taken away.