Month: May 2016 (Page 2 of 3)

Add your final projects as a new post, and make sure you categorize your post under “Final Projects” so they display properly.

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Final assignment

instagram.com/lookatme.ntalhealth

The medium of photography has the capacity to be extremely personal and entirely honest. Unfortunately, the medium is also able to be dishonest; images hold more power than we consciously assume, and they can easily perpetuate stereotypes and stigmas within our society without complete intent. With regards to mental illness, a powerful stigma exists in all aspects of our society. As Peter Byrne points out in Advances in Psychiatric Treatment in 2000, “Mental illness, despite centuries of learning and the ‘Decade of the Brain,’ is still perceived as an indulgence, a sign of weakness” (Byrne 1). There are many complex reasons as to why this stigma still exists today, regardless of the advanced knowledge the science world now knows about mental illness. Photography plays an arguably significant role in the preservation and extension of this stigma; more often than not, photos of extreme, isolating images are used to represent the whole of mental illnesses in the media, advertising, and even so-called awareness campaigns. This stereotypical, false representation of mental illness is not only unfair, but also truly detrimental towards any attempts to break down the social stigma surrounding the mental health community.

Photography and mental illness come together in a large, positive way in the work of Ashley Gilbertson. He is of course renowned for his work with preserving the memory of veterans, many of whom died due to poorly diagnosed or poorly treated mental illnesses after returning home from war. Gilbertson himself openly speaks about his personal encounter with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after he returned from covering the war in Iraq (Mccauley). His ability to identify with this mental illness undoubtedly heightens his ability to photograph it truthfully.

In 2013, Gilbertson photographed Stacy Pearsall, a fellow conflict photographer who was in the midst of coping with PTSD and suicidal thoughts after having travelled imbed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photos are stunning; they show Pearsall smoking a pipe in the woods behind her house and tending to her horse outside her barn. They are very high quality images, but the content is overwhelmingly average. Pearsall does not look incredibly sad, nor incredibly happy. She simply exists in her personal normalcy. Herein lies the beauty of these photos: Gilbertson was able to capture a woman with a mental illness just acting like a human being.

This series of photos was the inspiration for my project. I have personally dealt with mental illness in family members around me growing up, and within myself. I also feel personally affected by the stigma – I ignored the social anxiety and depression that shaped my life for as long as possible. I unknowingly partook in “self-stigmatization,” which is accepting a stigma to be true and then turning it on oneself, usually in the form of shame (Corrigan 485). On this topic, Byrne again ponders:

The question arises as to just what all this shame and secrecy is about. Negative cultural sanction and myths combine to ensure scapegoating in the wider community. The reality of discriminatory practices supplies a very real incentive to keep mental health problems a secret. Patients who pursue the secrecy strategy and withdraw have a more insular support network.

All of the stigmatizing in our society is supported in the photographs and portrayals we see representing mental illness. In a study of how mental illness is shown in television, a study found only 3% of characters to be openly impacted by an illness, and of that small percentage, “the mentally ill were most likely to commit violence and to be victimized (Signorielli). Additionally, “the mentally ill characters were less likely to be employed outside the home, and if so employed were likely to be seen as failures” (Signorielli). In advertisements that deal in some way with mental illness – whether it be for medication to treat symptoms, a suicide hotline promotion, or just a general good-will ad about reaching out to those in need – the illness is always portrayed in the extreme. A dark, depressed man curled up in the fetal position, meaning depression. A woman with her face in her hands, hair frazzled, meaning anxiety. These images are difficult to relate to for someone without these illnesses, and they may even be difficult to relate to for someone with these illnesses – photographs that dramatize and even exaggerate certain characteristics of mental illness further the distance between “the mentally healthy” and “the mentally ill,” prolong the tendency to “other” those who suffer from an illness beyond their control, extend the cycle of shame and fear and secrecy, and perpetuate the stigma surrounding mental illness.

With both this and the refreshingly more pleasant and “normal” work done by Ashley Gilbertson in mind, my project became an attempt to capture, basically, a boring day in the life of someone with social anxiety. I based the style of my photography on Jessica Dimmock’s series of photos on uninsured Americans – she used low-resolution, almost grainy imagery to show a woman’s struggle to receive cancer treatment without health insurance. I loved the way the images looked, and as I was only working with the camera on an iPhone 5S, the idea of “low-res” was particularly appealing.

None of my photos have people in them, and that was a conscious decision. Thinking through the biggest day-to-day struggle for me and my anxiety, I felt that finding a place to sit is always the most challenging. Having spoken to other people with similar anxieties, this seems to be common – it can be very stressful to either sit surrounded by other people or sit alone; nothing ever feels ideal. So, the majority of my images deal with seating in some capacity. One shows the outside of a therapist’s office, which is just a regular office in the Liberal Studies building; one shows medicine mixed in on a bookshelf. I created an Instagram account for this project and uploaded my photos through there, mimicking Dimmock’s style through filtering each photo in the same way. I felt a social media account would be ideal to present these bland, fairly boring photos – through social media, we are expected to present our best, most idealized self to the world. This only adds to the capacity and tendency to be secretive and ashamed of one’s true feelings and struggles.

I know I am not a good photographer and I certainly do not claim to be one. I had a strong motivation and idea behind my project, and I carried out the visual side as best I could. What I hope is conveyed through this project, even a little bit, is that “normal” means so many different things to so many different people. Someone with a mental illness has a different “normal” than someone without one, but that does not make them any less of a person. Portrayals of mental illness in photography and the media only make this more difficult for people to see; the stigma surrounding mental illness will not break down until people are able to see one another not as “other,” but as fellow human beings.

Works Cited

Byrne, Peter. “Stigma of Mental Illness and Ways of Diminishing It.” BJPsych Advances, 06 Jan. 2000. Web. 06 May 2016.

Corrigan, Patrick. “Structural Levels of Mental Illness Stigma and Discrimination.” Schizophrenia Bulletin. Oxford Journals, n.d. Web. 04 May 2016.

Dimmock, Jessica. “America’s Uninsured.” VII Photo Archive. VII Photo, 2007. Web. 02 May 2016.

Gilbertson, Ashley. “Military Suicide.” VII Photo Archive. VII Photo, 2014. Web. 03 May 2016.

McCauley, Adam. “Overexposed: A Photographer’s War With PTSD.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 20 Dec. 2012. Web. 06 May 2016.

Signorielli, Nancy. “The Stigma of Mental Illness on Television.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 33.3 (2009): n. pag. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 03 May 2016.

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Women’s Empowerment through the Everyday

1. Ivory Miniatures

What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow? — How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour? —Jane Austen

Often, many critics of Austen’s words, originally written to her nephew, Edward, improperly cite her words as a way to portray a deprecation of “female” writing as suitable or accommodating to the expectations of the female gender (Leffel). Her stories of young women, of love, of courtship, and femininity—these seem to represent her succumbing to the expectations put on women in literature. However, a good look at her writing reveals “a dazzling array of experiments with literary form and genre… [that are] filled with rebellious, transgressive heroines who steal, murder, elope, binge, and booze” and notably radical content that extends far beyond the demarcated field of literature in which women in her era were expected to remain (Leffel). Austen “playfully skewers generic conventions and forces the reader to re-think customary constructions of the novel” and miniaturizes the “picturesque” genre through an empowerment of the typical, expected, everyday topics. She uses heroines “who boldly and unapologetically flaunts gender boundaries, social codes, and even laws…[challenging] her era’s stifling restrictions on women’s bodies and minds at the same time that she questions exactly what constitutes a ‘novel’” (Leffel). She takes the “everyday” woman, her everyday settings and the typical representation of such, in order to comment upon “gendered conventions and social and political implications that this genre in particular—and the novel more generally—normatively assumes” (Leffel). Through her writing and use of satire of the expected tropes in women’s writing, Austen empowers the everyday notions of “femininity” and transforms them into platforms of growth and strength. 

2. The Ethics of Seeing

Susan Meiselas, a Magnum photographer, empowers in a medium different from Austen’s—through photography. As a lover of anthropology, Meiselas shares an intrigue of the human condition, constantly searching for meaning within the people she captures. She often speaks about the “ethics of seeing,” which “involves connecting, engaging, and feeling compassion for your subjects” as a way into truly brining value to a photo (“The Ethics of Seeing”). By connecting with the photo’s story and context, viewers are pushed to extend themselves out into the world and explore overarching themes. The particular photograph that I connected with and used to push myself into the direction of my project was taken in Monimbo, Nicaragua, in 1979, while she was documenting the country’s treacherous revolution. In this photo, a woman, in an eye-catching red dress, pushes a dead body, wrapped up and tied down to a wooden cart. More time and research with this photo led me to the following facts: the woman is 14 years old, and the dead body is her husband. Meiselas represents her powerfully, in a bold dress, holding up the dead body. To me, this photo portrayed the great hand women have had and continue to have in holding up history. Through this photo, I went beyond the story behind the woman and the dead body and grasped onto the potential symbolic implications of this depiction: the concept of strong women. With this idea in mind, I look into some more of Meiselas’ other work, particularly her work on carnival strippers.

3. Candid Representation

In Carnival Strippers (1972-1975), her first major work, Meiselas, without eroticizing or sexualizing, captures the raw reality of the lives of “women who performed striptease for small town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina” (Meiselas). Overcoming the stigma and potential preconceived biases that could easily have been attached to her work on women who hold jobs that are not respected in society, she candidly—and truthfully—observed their situation. Using both photographs and interviews, Meiselas captured these women on stage and backstage, and “what is revealed is that, behind the curtain, the dancers are essentially workers. Taking a few minutes off, they are resting, cleaning up, smoking” (English). She shows the uncompromising truth of their lives which are not always about being sex icons. She documents their everyday, and in this, like Austen, Meiselas empowers their efforts to make a living the best they could within a “seedy” world. She emphasizes the voices of these women and challenges the societal conventional confines that aim to demean and weaken the strength of women in such jobs.

4. My Project

Through these three lenses, combining the idea of empowerment through the rawness of the everyday and the concept of “holding up” history, I found myself focusing on a subject that was real—and close—to me: women in college. Through photosets of my friend, Sam, in different settings, holding different things, I strived to paint a few different ways in which women in college can be empowered in the everyday, the “ordinary,” through the ivory miniatures of their daily lives. Like Meiselas, I wanted to take advantage of the illustrative, narrative quality that photographs embrace. In order to paint a tangible depiction of female empowerment through the everyday, I decided to use platform of the photo collage. Through the combining of photos that capture the whole body, the hand, the act of holding up and object, I created a fuller representation of the empowerment of women through everyday concepts.

I wanted to explore the empowerment of women without having to romanticize them, to portray strong women in ordinary life, rather than as superheroes or goddesses. Thus, I created three photosets, titled Sword, Shield, and Armor; each one signifying one way in which the everyday, the ordinary, the usual, gives power to women in college.

A play on the phrase, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” Sword portrays how expression, the concept of writing, acts as a tool for women in college to not only express themselves but speak up. Particularly in an era of technology and internet, sharing your writing has become incredibly simple. Through blogs, diaries, journals—entities often associated with the female experience and popular among women in college—we are encouraged to and hold the authority to share the female voice which is much less prevalent in mainstream news, media, and literature. By “holding up” our pens, women garner the propensity to be heard, to create, to use writing as a tool for social change and equality; we strike against the trends in our world—in literature, journalism, and influential schools of thought that are charged with the masculine experience. Through the power of the written word, she speaks up for her strength, her belief, her capabilities.

Armor focuses on what women choose to wear and fights the stigma around the phrase, “dressed to be seen.” Taken at Washington Square Park, full of people who come to see and to be seen, I spurn the idea that women are objects of entertainment and dress for others. Beyond deconstructing the stigma around how women dress, how they should dress, and how their clothes label them, I want to reject the stigma around the idea of presentation, of showing off. Through their clothes—accessories, makeup—women not only express themselves but are empowered to use her the clothes she holds up with her body as a demonstration of the beauty of herself, her style, her woman-ness. Instead of being shackled by labels, women dress in their “armor” against the demarcation of the identity of a woman based on her clothes. The way she chooses to present herself empowers her in her self-expression, her presentation of herself to the world, allowing her to not be shaken by attacks against her identity. She is strong in who she is and she shows this through the clothes she chooses to wear each day.

The last photoset, Shield, represents how college women empower themselves through knowledge and education. With intelligence and wisdom, women can stay informed and well-educated on the workings of the world in order to fight against ignorance, injustice, and inequality. Through education, women are empowered to not only take on influential, powerful positions in the workforce, the government, the society, but also protect—to shield—themselves from further discrimination and patronization. Education equates to independence. Through the act of learning, women garner skillsets to help them thrive and support themselves in the world, instead of falling into the molds society expects us to fall into. Through her education, she harnesses the power to expand in a world that wants her to stay still.

Overall, through my project, I depict women empowerment, as a movement that has nothing to do with hierarchy, putting women over men. The primary objective of feminism— is about urging women to believe in their capabilities and identities as living beings who are capable of immense strength and creativity. As Mary Wollstonecraft states, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”

Works Cited (and Consulted)

Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters, a Family Record. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965. Print.

English, Deirdre. Stripped Bare: Nude Girls and Naked Truth.” Carnival Strippers. By Susan Meiselas. Steidl: Steidl, Gerhard Druckerei und Verlag, 2003. 153-9. Print.

The Ethics of Seeing. Perf. Susan Meiselas. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, n.d. Web.

Harrison, Jim. “A Lens on History.” Harvard Magazine. Harvard Magazine Inc, 19 Oct. 2010. Web. 06 May 2016.

Leffel, John C.  “Jane Austen’s Miniature ‘Novel’: Gender, Politics and Form in The Beautiful Cassandra.”  Persuasions 32 (2010): 184-95.

Meiselas, Susan. “Susan Meiselas Photographer.” Carnival Strippers. Magnum Photos, 1972-1975. Web. 06 May 2016.

“Portrait Miniature.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 06 May 2016.

Seymour, Tom. “Susan Meiselas: Carnival Strippers.” British Journal of Photography. Aptitude Media Ltd., 23 Jan. 2015. Web. 06 May 2016.

Todd, Janet.  “Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen.”  British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History.  Ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan.  New York: Palgrave, 2005.  76-97.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, the Wollstonecraft Debate, Criticism. New York: Norton, 1988. Print.

Go to this site!

http://msj3328.wix.com/foodnyc

After coming across Starved for Attention, I began thinking about how to bring about change without asking for donations. Something that we talked about a lot during the discussion about Starved for Attention was the site’s use of a petition. We came to the conclusion that the petition was a good idea, but some parts of the website were not entirely convincing enough (i.e. the amount of content on the site, stereotypes of women and children) to prompt a viewer to enter their name into a petition and support their cause.

For my final project, I was inspired to tackle the idea of hunger in New York City. Like Starved for Attention, I thought that creating a site that ultimately encourages users to sign a petition would be an effective way to present a problem, and a call to action. I then realized that impoverished around the world tend to grow their own foods, despite having little to no money. The opposite is true in New York City. The more I thought about it, the more I understood that people living in poverty in New York City are more likely to buy unhealthy and nutritionally lacking fast food rather than fresh, pure foods. That is because seemingly basic items, like tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, etc. can be considered luxury items, and a privilege if one is able to afford them.

The cost of living in New York is excessively high. According to the Council for Community and Economic Research, groceries in New York cost between 28% and 39% more than the national average (Wallace). To that end, New York City sees elevated levels of poverty. In 2015, New York City reported an 18.3% poverty rate, compared to statewide poverty rate of 15.9% (NYSCAA). With necessities like food costing significantly more than the rest of the country, and considering the poverty rate in New York City, I wanted to explore the cost of food in New York City and try to find a solution to help those of low socioeconomic statuses to be able to attain healthier foods. Clearly, those who are impoverished are not doing anything wrong when they buy fast foods. But for a dollar in New York City, one could buy either an entire meal at McDonald’s, or a single, raw vegetable at a market—if that.

At first, I created a website to demonstrate the price of food in New York. I attempted to contrast food that can be bought at different price points, such as $1.00 pizza and McDonald’s, versus a Russ & Daughter’s lox and bagel board, or farmer’s market vegetables. For the sake of my own aesthetic style and also to dignify the food at all price points, I attempted to make each photo look as appealing to the viewer as possible.

Once I created that, I had decided that I proved a point, but in emulating Starved for Attention, I needed a potential solution to the issue and some call to action. I immediately thought that community gardens placed in empty lots in low-income neighborhoods would not only help to beautify the city, but would also help to educate and empower people who may not be able to afford fresh foods. Similarly, community gardens are sustainable, and would ultimately save its residents money.

In an NPR podcast titled, There Goes The Neighborhood, an organization called Arts East New York had created art installations in an empty lot, which served to educate the community and bring people together. This is exactly my intent for advocating the development of community gardens. However, the lot mentioned in the podcast was taken over by developers under Mayor DeBlasio’s 80/20 affordable housing project.

This development program, titled, the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program creates new buildings (often in low income neighborhoods) that guarantee a certain percentage of housing to be allocated for low-income buyers. While this is a great idea in theory, the podcast mentions that many of these new buildings are going up in areas where gentrification is happening. To that, if predominantly young, well-off residents move into these buildings and gentrify the area, this will create bigger disparities in the community, and original residents will continue to struggle. We can see this through the opening of “high end” grocery stores like Whole Foods, which cater to a much higher price point than many can afford.

As a result, I decided that my call to action would be to petition Mayor DeBlasio. While his development plan has been approved by the city council, the goal of my website is to convince him to allocate a certain percentage of lots in low income neighborhoods to be developed as community gardens.

In order to convince website visitors to sign the petition, I’ve also included two resources that demonstrate how to create a community garden. The first, called Urban Reviewer, is an interactive map created by 596 Acres, a nonprofit aiming to create community spaces in New York’s empty lots. This feature could be used to demonstrate the number of empty lots in New York City, but could also encourage viewers to find an empty lot near them. Additionally, I provided a link to an article that explains how to start a community garden in New York City. It attempts to make the process easy. Ena McPherson, a woman who works at two community gardens in New York, states, “You don’t need money to start [a] garden, you just need to get yourself hooked up with the [city] agencies, the resources out there to get you started” (Evelly).

In the end, I hope that my website serves as a good starting off point for people to begin thinking about the benefits of a community garden. I think that my choice of digital format is necessary in presenting multiple issues. The photos that I took for this project are only a starting point. Through a well-organized, visual experience, I would hope that the simplicity of the website that I created would ultimately help to convince people to sign the petition.

Works Cited:

http://www.starvedforattention.org/

https://smartasset.com/mortgage/what-is-the-cost-of-living-in-new-york-city (Wallace).

http://nyscommunityaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2015-Poverty-Report-w-50th-logos-for-online.pdf  (NYSCAA).

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/neighborhood/

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/mih/mandatory-inclusionary-housing.page

http://www.urbanreviewer.org/#map=12/40.7400/-74.0012&sidebar=plans

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3038089/mapping-new-yorks-vacant-lots-to-use-them-to-create-a-more-vibrant-city

https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140924/astoria/how-you-can-turn-new-york-citys-vacant-lots-into-community-gardens (Evelly).

Works Cited

1. Bayoumi, Moustafa. This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. New York: New York UP, 2015. Print.
2. Haviv, Ron. Manny Rodrigeuz, a Pennsylvania State Constable, Salutes an American Flag during Events Commemorating the 10th Anniversary of the Sept. 11 Attacks in New York, N.Y., Sept. 11, 2011.
3. Meiselas, Susan. USA. NYC. September 11, 2015. Observing a Moment of Silence outside the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Observance of the Beginning of the September 11th Attacks. 2015.
4. Otterman, Sharon. “Film at 9/11 Museum Sets Off Clash Over Reference to Islam.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 23 Apr. 2014. Web. 05 May 2016.
5. Reed, Eli. USA. NYC. September 11, 2002. Spectators across from Ground Zero Attend the World Trade Center Memorial Ceremony.
6. “Stiftung Denkmal Für Die Ermordeten Juden Europas: Field of Stelae.” Stiftung Denkmal Für Die Ermordeten Juden Europas: Field of Stelae. Web. 05 May 2016. <http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/the-memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe/field-of-stelae.html>.
7. Sturken, Marita. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.  Print.