For my second Action project in my core class Journalism, I interviewed a friend of mine. In journalism, we focus on how important telling and recording stories that we find in life are. Often times we don't think about how stories and events, specifically from social media and news sites influence our everyday thinking.
Below is my reflection and discussion of the concepts that my friend and I explored, and a photo that I took to represent what my friend believes to be the meaning of life.
On November 6, 2020, I interviewed my friend( who I will address as Tek.) I invited him over to my house to spark a discussion about a question that many people have asked.
What is the meaning of life?
When I first asked him this, he replied with:
"When people ask me that question, I feel like they're asking what the purpose of life is."
I followed up with the question, so then what do you feel the purpose is? He replied with:
"See, that question doesn't exactly make sense to me. I don't know how to answer that, cause there' is no meaning. There is no explanation for why we are here like there is no reasoning for it. It doesn't make sense to ask that question, in my opinion."
After this statement I asked:
"Where did you come to this conclusion? How do you know this to be true?"
He breaks down his reasoning and outlook:
"I realized recently that I'm not really super happy and part of that is because of what I've been taught growing up. For so much of my life, people have been telling me that that I need to succeed and that I need to be doing all this stuff to achieve this goal of success."
"I feel guilty about a lot of things that I feel like I shouldn't feel guilty about. I am American, so a lot of my views and way of thinking are because of these people around me pushing capitalist ideas onto me.
"I feel bad when I'm doing something that isn't productive, cause everyone is always saying that you have to be working all the time or your gonna, I don't know, fail in life, or something. I just don't think I agree with everyone thinking that you have to spend your whole life working up to more work."
"Of course, at the end of the day, everyone has their own meaning of life, and everyone works towards different things in their life, by making their own choices about how they feel."
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| Aura (2020) Tek walking the crossroads |
Above is a photo of my close friend, Tek. In this photo, he walked diagonally across a 4-way stop sign intersection. From the conversation that we had, Tek's conclusion was that it's different for everyone and that there are different choices to make, that can change and affect a person's own definition of the meaning of life. I wanted to show that for every individual, including Tek, there are options in life, and forks in the road to choose from, and sometimes opportunities and events will come crashing into you, without you even realizing, much like the intersection!
It is dark outside in the photo, so I feel that there is an atmosphere of mystery in the photo. Nothing is perfectly clear or easy to look at. It looks risky and unfamiliar, much like how we feel when we make decisions in life. To achieve this feeling I kept the aperture at a relatively low setting.
The shutter speed was high so that he wasn't blurred in motion while walking. I wanted to make it clear that he was walking on the intersection, and not standing there. I originally wanted to have him sitting or standing in the middle of the intersection, but having him look in different directions as he was walking, made the image more engaging, Someone looking at this photo would want to look in the direction he was looking, and would want to know what is he looking at? Where is he going? Those are the questions we ask ourselves, and having him walk gives that ironic self-reflection.
If I had more time to think about how I would want this to be set up, I would have stood further away so that the other intersections were more visible. I think that at the very least, I was able to make it clear that there were different roads and directions. I think a clearer silhouette of his body would make this photo easier to take in, and a higher quality camera would make the finer details of this photo better. I am still satisfied with what I was able to pull off in a limited amount of time, and with the little equipment and setup I had.
It was really nice to talk with Tek, and hearing what he's been thinking about during this unpredictable year, 2020. I agree with a lot of the things we talked about, and those ideas had also been on my mind, and discussing with someone about them was really insightful, and refreshing. Taking this photo was also a fun outlet for him and me because I believe we were both able to express the feelings that we were sharing in this photo.
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