Documenting my life

Over the course of sixteen weeks I took my camera with me almost everywhere I went, photographing the food I ate, the things I did, the places I went, and the people around me, always incorporating an aspect of myself in the photographs. I have always wanted to keep a journal about my life and now I have created my own visual journal showing with photographs rather than describing with words. My camera is my pen and the photographs are my text.

I wanted to create something with meaning,

I realized my life as a whole is the most meaningful,

So I began to see.

I saw the world, my world through the lens of my eyes.

And I began to document my life,

Through the first person perspective,

By opening the shutter of my camera,

Allowing light to hit the film,

Capturing my vision of my life

And the art of my everyday.

When I see colors, I no longer look at them the same way as I did when I was photographing in black and white. I have to think twice before pressing the shutter, taking a chance to really look at the colors in front of me. The way William Eggleston captures color in his photographs inspires me. Some of my photographs in a way relate to Cindy Sherman’s work in the sense that she took self portraits. However, in her self portraits it is as if she was anonymous and in some of my photos I feel the same way, like the photographs are not about my life but just life itself. Nikki S. Lee’s series Parts influenced my project. She incorporates her full self in her photographs with parts of an anonymous male person. In comparison I played a similar role to the male as only parts of me are seen and my full body is cropped out.