Monday, February 2, 2015

Project #3: Sleepytown

Sleepytown is a series of photographs taken between 7 and 10am on a Tuesday morning on the Lawrence campus and the surrounding area. The project attempts to counteract Marshall McLuhan’s idea of “allatonceness” (63) and “a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else” (61), as well as address “the humanity of the moment” and the possibility of “a genuine connection between individuals” (Greenough 187-188). As a society, social media and the process of being constantly connected to each other consumes us just as much as we consume it. The idea of this series was to ask whether we could remove ourselves from the busyness of “allatonceness” and reconnect to ourselves, to our physical surroundings, and to our in-person relationships.

I tried to order the photos to reflect the idea of waking up, creating a gradient from solitary to social, cold to warm, impersonal to personal. These photos attempt to make the everyday more visible in an attempt to capture “the humanity of the moment” and a heightened awareness of our surroundings.


 And while I think the series achieves this progression in some ways, in others it seems to remain disconnected and distant. Several photos in a row show students absorbed in their phones, making them seem far away no matter where the camera is or what tone the photo has. The final photo of two students at a table in the cafĂ© is the closest we get to a look at an in-person relationship, but they aren’t looking at each other, and they’re not speaking. So in this age of extreme technological connectedness, how connected are we really? We should be aware of how our technological connectedness affects our human connectedness, and that “allatonceness” doesn’t necessarily translate to awareness of the things around us and of the world at large. So we have to consciously make the commitment to be present in our lives; we have to continue to find “the humanity in the moment.”

Click here to view the photo set in Flickr. (Note: Start from the bottom up.)

4 comments:

  1. I really like the progression of "cold to warm, impersonal to personal." It really creates an arc for your album and connects everything to each other. I think it's really interesting that your photos both refute and support the McLuhan quote- like you pointed out in your post, your photos are gradually getting more personal, but exactly how "personal" is personal in this technological world?

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  2. The scenes of Lawrence students waking up are so familiar...they're comfortable. I really like how you capture that comfort as well as trying to get more and more personal in the relationships you represent with your photos. You did a great job of both illustrating your point and questioning it.

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  3. The narrative of the morning progressing from barren college campus to slightly bustling college campus is pretty funny. I like how you captured a pretty boring and generally negative time of the day in a poetic kind of way.

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  4. Your photographs are full of great details and the ones of the off-campus locations are very painterly. They really do bring vibrancy to what one could simply write off as mundane. I believe that your on-campus photographs do a highlight a certain social connectedness between the people living and working there, that they all walk the same paths and share similar interests despite being in different fields or at different levels of understanding.

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