Cantrell,+D+Wk+11

There's a few things in Ramage that can relate to my VSP. Ramage talks about "any given relationship that forms around a sybolic act must finally be understood as a //complex series// of relationships...one can think of them as distinct, like separate fingers, or one can think of them as one interrelated whole, like a hand" (152). My series of pictures (going around counter-clockwise in a circle) can be looked at independently or as a series, and they must be to understand the essence trying to be conveyed. In the way that I've ordered the pictures "they don't simply describe connections between points, they generate connections and actively influence our understanding of the connected points" (153).

Of course my title, and concept I'm conveying is "Waiting for Mr. Right". Previously, I had lots of images of regency and victorian styled women looking mournful/gloomy and of course the time element with the watch. I've re-worked some of the pictures I had previously included, changing the direction of the story from passive waiting for Mr. Right, to moving on from that dream in the middle of it,(after figuring out it's not all its cracked up to be.) The main lady becomes a WWII pilot and a rosie the riveter type girl, creating an active life for herself, instead of waiting on a man to be the fulfillment of her dreams. Like Ramage said, I'm generating the connections people make about this topic and the journey entailed; that's a lot of power I have.

Malcolm talks about photo arrangement and the effect it creates. Szarkowski's "idea of plucking photographs from their familiar contexts as newspaper pictures or snapshots or art photographs and arranging them according to how they might exemplify and illuminate five 'characterisitcs and problems that have seemed inherent in the medium' which Szarkowski had isolated and names 'The Thing Itself', 'The Detail': 'The Frame', 'Time' and 'The Vantage Point"' (56). Both Malcolm and Ramage talk about the importance of my part in arranging the said narrative in pictures. Each picture could be looked at in terms of Malcolm's five characteristics/problems.

Something Ramage also says is about personal experience, which I think relates to both Malcolm and builds off what was previously mentioned in terms of the VSP and communicating direction. "Personal experience, even if it is highly idiosynchratic, can serve a function similar to that of a shared text, providing we can construe a shareable narrative account of that experience. And all of us draw on personal experience, including our own idiosynchratic reading history, to help us diminish our uncertainty over a new text that puzzles us" (156). While this idea for my VSP (waiting for Mr. Right) is based on personal experience, I've had to take it out of my hands in order to construct a story that is true to the direction I want to take it, and something others can try to understand. I want this visual story to be both ironic and inspiring, instead of just fairytale-esq I've concluded. There's enough dreamy Disney, fairytale, movies and texts out there that are removed from reality, I thought this should be different; this requires that it's a "shareable narrative".