Guidelines and suggestions for 2nd short paper: a "reading" of a personal photograph.

This should be a concise, 3-page paper, (each page approx. 250-300 words).   (Please, no reformatting in large or unusual fonts to artificially lengthen the paper.)

Your paper should be an attempt to derive meaning from a single personal photograph, drawing upon both the photograph itself and your own history and/or the history of your family.  The photograph should be one that is actually in your possession (original or copy) and you should attach a copy of the photograph to the paper.

Your style of writing can be a straightforward exposition or it can take the form of creative writing.   Do not write this paper (or at least its final version) until we discuss the topic in class and the readings related to it: bell hooks' In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life and Herve Guibert's Ghost Image.    This reading and the class discussion are intended to encourage your own meditation on the meaning of your personal and family pictures and may help you to formulate your writing about the photograph you've selected.

The photograph you choose may interest you because it reveals much about your family or yourself or conversely it may interest you because it remains a puzzle. As with the first short paper, a good place to start may be with a careful description of the photograph and what you find to be its significant details. Here are a few things to think about that may help you to get started:

• Consider the photograph not simply as an image, but as a situation. Under what circumstances was it made? For what purpose? Has the photograph been displayed or shared by your family and how? Has photography played a part in your life and/or that of your family members? On what occasions has the camera been used to record events?

• Is the photograph a projection of the photographer’s own needs and desires or that of the subject’s?  Are they different?

• Are there things that are expressed visually about yourself or those portrayed in the photograph that resonate or fail to resonate with what has been expressed by words or actions? Does the photograph represent some truth that you understand about yourself or your family or does it represent a fiction?  In what ways does it correspond or fail to correspond to your memory?   What role might the photograph play in the construction of memory?

• Keep in mind that there are things that this photograph may be able to tell you that it could not tell others because of your personal knowledge of the people and events depicted in the photograph . Does the photograph serve to reveal or to hide these things?