The Journey of Finding Self Love
When we were first
assigned this photo essay I was having a very hard time deciding what kind of
story would work. I realize now that I
was going about it the wrong way. I was thinking
of photos that I wanted to take and then was trying to find some story that
would fit into those pictures.
Ultimately, that didn’t end well because I kept hitting a bunch of dead
ends and couldn’t find a narrative that matched any pictures I had in mind. I toyed around with two different stories and
was actually set on one in which I followed by brother’s life around for a day
to tell the story of a high school student, but I wasn’t excited about it at
all. I already compiled a list of some
photos I was going to take, however was dreading taking them. It wasn’t until I was scrolling through my
camera roll one day and stumbled across a picture of me, smiling with a
bunch of acne on my face. That’s when
the idea hit me, and everything else seemed to fall in place. I was actually really excited to work on the
project now.
My
favorite part of the project was taking the pictures. This story while it was about my acne and how
I ended up where I am today with it, I didn’t want to focus on that. The best thing that happened to me from this
whole acne debacle was the way I feel about myself, not the fact that my acne
cleared up. While some parts of the
story were necessary to include so it flowed like a narrative, I wanted to
emphasize the emotion behind it all. Good
portions of my shots are portraits, but I don’t find them repetitive. These portrait shots are of me, but they are
all different from one another and flow chronologically to tell the story. You can see it in my face how I changed
throughout the process. With some of
these photos I got creative with it. My
two favorite pictures were the ones with the bag over my head and with
masking tape covering the mirror. Of
course I didn’t actually leave the house with a trash bag on, or bombard my
mirror with tape, but the goal of these photos were to reflect how I felt
inside. I didn’t want anyone to see me,
which is what the trash bag portrayed and I also didn’t want to look at myself,
which was shown by the mirror picture. I
also felt it appropriate for these photos to be in black and white because it
exposed them in a darker light, and during that time I was feeling scary, dark
emotions.
The challenge I faced when producing
this story was how much technicality did I want to include. What I mean by this was I was debating if I
wanted to talk more about the medications I was on and the order in which I was
prescribed them. I felt if I did that
then it would start to become repetitive.
To avoid this I took a photo of all of the prescriptions I received
throughout the years to show all of them off.
I wanted the readers to see how many different products I’ve tried
because it’s been a lot, instead of saying at my first appointment I was
prescribed this, then my second it was this, etc. Another thing I struggled with was the
formatting of the project. I intended on
producing it on Word and then copy and pasting it to Google Slides since that
gives you a link. Every time I typed
something new my pictures would move locations and I ended up spending so much
time trying to get things in the places I wanted them to be. I eventually gave up on using Word and used
PowerPoint instead. I still like how the
final product looks, it was just frustrating spending all that time getting it
to work out on Word to only abandon that idea.
This type of storytelling is unlike any other
genre I’ve dabbled in because you need to find a way to tell a story through
pictures. While there is still text
involved I think that in a photo essay the reader should still be able to
strictly look at the photos and have an idea of what the story is. If readers are unable to do this then I don’t
believe the work to be a successful photo essay. What also makes a photo essay unique is the
text that is present. At first it was
difficult to not type out the entire story with text and throw in a couple
pictures that went along with it. In
traditional storytelling that is what you would do, so it was an adjustment to
have to approach this assignment in a different way. The text should not tell the story word for
word, it should be a crutch to the photos and vise versa. The tricky thing about a photo essay is
finding that perfect balance in text and pictures. One should not outshine the other, but work
together in creating the story.
It’s
very easy to get lost in a photo essay, so I would recommend doing quite a bit
on planning beforehand. What I did was
first I came up with a story I wanted to tell and then I started brainstorming
some pictures. Once I had a good bit of photos in mind, I went back and ordered them chronologically. Next I took the pictures on my list and made
sure the ordering made sense and that there were no photos missing in telling
the story. When my photos were edited
and in order, I then started to add text that went off of the pictures. For me this was the most efficient way to go
about this project. Overall I really enjoyed the photo
essay. It dealt with two things I
love being writing and photography.
I’m happy with how my final product turned out and hope to make more of
this form of digital storytelling in the future.
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