Better Lives Blog 3 Project Outcomes and Personal Reflection
When the Better Lives project was first introduced to us, I had no clue which topic I would like to study. There was so many things that were of interest to me, but I chose to study Contemporary Photography because that was the topic that I understood the less in all of these. I never really got why a picture could be show in an art gallery, how it could speak to people and make them think. Because to me, when you took a picture it wasn’t really your work, it was simply observing things that others would do and that anyone could see so I didn’t get the point. That’s why I chose to pick this project. I wanted to understand and see photography as the art that it is. At the beginning I had issues with understanding the whole concept and how it worked but through the lectures I discovered that photography can truly convey a message, show things that were hidden to people all around the world and show the impact of decisions made everywhere. A picture is not only a picture, it is a message created by the photographer and it can show ones personality or emotions. I started looking at the pictures that my peers posted in our group project and everything was so different! People really had different perspectives of things and different ways of conveying the same story sometimes. Even if I didn’t see contemporary photography in an artistic way, I started to take pictures on my own, of the things that would surround me, of friends, my family, and I even started to stage things to create my environment and see what I could express. Lectures after lectures I saw the potential of photography and its impact on the world and on the people that make it and the ones who see it. Photography can analyse fashion, analyse people, analyse the system in which we’re living in, ethnicities, genders, sexuality, peoples ethics, sustainability and even more things. It’s a wonderful tool to show people what can be done to make our world a better place (very cliché I know but true) because it evolves around sustainability, diversity and social responsibility. For my project and my view of this, I think that photography is a wonderful thing to try while we are all under lockdown, because sometimes you don’t really think when you take a picture, but the picture will say a lot about yourself even if you didn’t mean to tell something. Photography is the reflection of someones mind and of the world, for better or for worse, and I will keep looking at pictures to see how people embrace their creativity and their ways of thinking.