Cantrell,+D+wk+12

My Visual Story Project has taken on quite a transformation over the last few days. I've moved from telling a story in the way I thought it should be told, to the way that seems more true to life, and frankly more inspiring.It's been a transformative experience in that I'm having to locate myself within the story as both spectator and participant (Blakesley & Brooke). I'm in the process of living life, of participating in the waiting for my true partner, and this story creation (which in a sense is an extension of myself) makes me self-aware of my process. At the same time I've had to disassociate from the story and defamiliarize myself with the pictures I had originally connected with as being "the story". I've had to discount (Ramage 5) my own background/history/culture and the pictures' specific connotations to create another purpose than just their individual one. This goes along with the idea of montage theory by Eisenstein. Each photograph/shot is a unit of meaning, and when you put them together in a certain way/order they create new meanings. I've taken out and changed about half of the pictures I had originally chosen to fit a "fantasy-based dream" of the process of finding your prince charming. Originally most of the pictures had a rather pessimisitc, passive connotation from the attitude of the female figure in the pictures and the overall presence of them (coloration, mood). And then suddenly there was a sunlit path out of nowhere and the female character was in the arms of a prince. After getting imput from the professor, and the suggestion that I incorporate some irony, I decided to change my direction.

In the beginning of the semester we talked about identification and how photographs have two components to them: visual and metaphor or denotation and connotation. I begin the story with the title: "Waiting for Mr. Right" and I've changed the font to be like that of a girl's writing, and changed the background color to light pink to set the tone. Yesterday I realized that the addition of text would not only be beneficial, it was vital; so I added text to each picture as the linguistic messages (Barthes) that further illustrate the pictures.

Instead of continuing to propogate the myth that women need to be "saved" by a man, I changed the story to the fact that they are saved by the waiting: in the process they find out that they have the world at their feet and can do anything they want. They don't have to be funneled down a lane of waiting for someone else to make them happy. Women today are not "stuck in a waiting room until we marry" like the main character in Downton Abbey which takes place around WWI. I'm giving women, and myself, permission to take life by the horns and make something of it for themselves. This is opitomized in the picture of the WWII woman fighter pilot and the subsequent Rosie the Riveter girl working on some machinery. The last picture is of Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey who is symbolic of proud independence, with a man peaking in the window, proud of her and struck with admiration. My story's main character who has grown up within a culture of "waiting for Mr. Right" as the story is titled, finds at the end, that part of the waiting for someone to come along is to abandon that dream for a more personal one.

Purpose and interpretation are central ideas to both the story and the audience. "Raising awareness, thus, is the first responsibility of our interpretive model (Ramage 150). I definitely want to raise awareness that waiting for your true partner is a common experience and proposing a solution to an otherwise daunting feeling. While the story is targetted at young women age 14-23, men and women alike will view this VSP and I think they all will be able to find a purpose in viewing it, and be able to adapt to interpret it. Sontag discusses interpretation: " photographs are as much interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are" (6). These photographs in the way they are arranged definitely convey my intepretation of the world. As Ramage says, "interpretation is a way of reducing uncertainty" (150). Certainly my process of creating and interpreting my story has reduced uncertainty about my own future.