abrazito

The new quarter at Ohio feels very different from the last. These last weeks have brought energy to me that herald a quarter of what will hopefully be productivity and perspective.

In our photographic essay class with Prof. Stan Alost, we'll be covering the theme of community. Everyone is pretty excited about it. All of us have had to apply a butt ton of critical thinking to make sure we're undertaking a topic that we can address thoroughly and eloquently.

We're also learning how to express what we like about photos using words beyond the conventions of the technical elements of an image. It is understood that it is much more than composition, color and light, but I feel like we tend to turn to those ideas when discuss for one reason or another. Maybe its like its a traditional kind of language between photographers. But there's that need to communicate thoughts to the masses, not just other visual people. It's learning to talk about those things that we respond to inherently in an image. It's something I never realized I had trouble doing.

We had this assignment last week to go out and try to just touch on community visually somehow and I wound up in good ole' Glouster, Ohio again. I've been going back there a lot, but with no real game plan. This trip, I went to Moore's Diner and to a Trimble/Nelsonville York JV basketball game. This image is the first I've made in 2009 that I liked.

So for my essay, I was considering trying to focus on the younger part of the community in order to say something about the future of a community that has changed so quickly in the last couple of years. In my poking around, I found that Sonya Hebert sort of did a piece about this already for Soul of Athens a few years back.

Immediate reaction was to be discouraged. I was already sort of feeling silly because of all the great work that has been done on Glouster by Matt Eich (many of his Carry Me Ohio images are from the town) and stuff that class homie Josh Birnbaum worked hard on producing last quarter in the hollows of the town. But I don't know. It has been done?

I had a meeting with Terry, the program director, about my master's project yesterday and we talked about getting over the idea of the "it has been done before" excuse. That there's no problem in continuing and expanding a visual dialogue by 'piggybacking' on other's work. It makes sense what he says. I'm still not 100 percent committed to the idea of this as my expression of community and have yet to really develop a strong mission behind it.

This should be a good weekend of photographing if I stay disciplined and don't spend too much time holding hands with guapo or making grilled soy cheese sandwiches. Here's some more stuff to look at --