“On Aerial Photography and Secret Tunnels” (2024-2025)
English was always one of my strong suits. It was the first class to jump into my mind when an uncle or a mom’s friend asked what courses I liked most throughout elementary and high school. We studied analytical, argumentative, narrative, and expository essays in high school. How to write a page and a half in under twenty minutes, how to scan an article for what you want out of it, how to bluff. I often got told my writing was good: I knew what it took to create a beginning, middle, and end, and I knew how to throw in an extra side of thesis. It made my teachers happy and it made me content.
My first-ever syllabus for writing the essay said this: “Your essays were good enough to get you into NYU. Yet a high school essay is not entirely synonymous with expository writing; if you think so, then you are mistaking the species for the genus.” That was when I realized that for the past four years, I hadn’t been writing for myself, but writing for whoever it was that was grading my papers, reiterating what it was they wanted to hear. I was a grade-A, expert bullshitter.
Progression 2: Reckoning
For this essay, I was asked to evaluate a writer’s argument by putting it into conversation with other pieces of evidence. Sounds simple, right?
Wrong, I could barely read the first paragraph of the ‘writer’s argument’ that I was given. My mind felt as if it were molding to the cage of a corkscrew. But, after numerous journal entries, meetings with my teacher and drafts that didn’t resemble its former, I accepted the fact that maybe my essay is the record of my mind thinking on the page.
From there, my involvement deepened, I allowed myself to include what I wrote in my journal into my essay – my honesty. I honestly didn’t understand the text and I honestly wrote about what it felt like to begin to and eventually grasp its barbarity. Maybe that’s an exaggerated word, but that’s how the essay felt to me—foreign, unknown. Through this essay, I’ve benefited from realizing that there are different distances you can take, the importance of rewatching and circling around the same territory from different distances more than once, even if you feel like you’re walking in the dark—because eventually you’ll start to notice what it is that makes that little bulb above your cranium begin to light up.
Iris Azul Enrique O’Connor is from San Francisco and is a student of the Interactive Media Arts major within the Tisch School of the Arts. She hopes to explore the realm of media and creative direction, focusing on film and mixed media art. Her freshman year English professor, Jenni Quilter, was a breath of fresh air, exposing her to the freedom to write “I” in an essay through looking inward just as well as adventuring outside personal comfort zones—and what changes in the process. Using Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory, the essay reveals the importance of rewatching and circling around the same territory from different distances in order to gain a clear perspective on a topic. Iris uncovers truths about her youthful naivety, being a cinema-goer, while entwining her newfound realizations.