“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
Zora Neale Hurston
When approaching this project, I wanted to come up with a strong visual theme that would tie the images together. Something that has always been powerful to me as a viewer of photography is double exposure work. I felt that this visual theme worked well for a project concerning my identity, as I often feel that elements of my identity are both contradictory and simultaneous. This in mind, I set off to manipulate old photographs of my life into mock double-exposed images. I chose to use images of windows in this layering technique, specifically pictures I took when visiting a Chateau nearby the town I studied abroad in. These allowed for this layered look without overcrowding the focal point and while adding vectors to the images that drew the viewers eyes to the focal point. I found all of the images used in this project on different social media accounts of me and my family. In this way, these images have been either self-representations or representations of me from people very close to me. This led me to wonder if these images of me that were provided and captioned by others created more meaning than those I had posted myself. As Rettberg suggests, it is the interaction with others that created meaning out of the images. When someone else tags you in a picture online, there is almost an immediate interaction between the two of you, even if you don’t directly communicate.
In this first series of images, I am seen in three moments of my life: the day I became an older sister, at a ballet recital–the sole ballerina striking a pose much to the amusement of my father, and on my most recent trip to Chicago with my sister on the day I decided to apply to Forensic Psychology graduate programs.
The Second Fig 