Date of Submission

Spring 2015

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Photography

Project Advisor 1

Barbara Ess

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Is a day worth remembering? What about a year? Is my life worth remembering?

I am always keeping track of experiences: where I went, who I saw, how I felt. Every little detail must be collected. As the diarist Sarah Manguso writes, “The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing that I’d missed it.” I’m obsessed with making time feel discrete.

The little things become my day, my year, my life; they become me. I raised my hand in class today; I need to stop eating so much sugar; I realized I love being busy; a seven-year-old told me that she thinks I’m pretty.

Someone recently asked me, “You’re a senior? You look so small.” I didn’t know whether he meant physically or otherwise. When I get dressed in the morning, I try to look small, indistinct. Most days I hate being seen.

Everything I do or feel matters to me, but I know I am immensely insignificant.

In Moyra Davey’s book Burn the Diaries, she quotes Virginia Woolf’s suicide note, “Will you dispose of all my papers?” I feel this sense of shame around everything I have made. An impulse to “destroy all my evidence.”

At the same time, I want to be understood. I want everybody to know the truest form of me. But I don’t know who I am, I’m not even sure if it matters, and I find this both devastating and absolutely hilarious.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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