you are:
the fingers that push back my hair
heroin and needles
gasp
burning cigarettes
the tuning of guitars
that scar on my arm
i am:
older than i was
passive in a bad way
oh, babe
flannel sheets in May
coffee with soy
that river bed
we were:
tattoos and freckles
frowned upon
good for each other
stop
too different
wildflowers
no
spring fever
too emotional for me
i think it’s best if you
just
leave.
- K. Weyerbacher, 2013
Websites:
Kelsey -
ReplyDeleteYour piece is definitely powerful, as Ross already stated. I hadn't read the comments to your other drafts before I viewed them, but "powerful" was the first word that came to my mind. Your photos are FANTASTIC! Each one conveys a ton of emotion and your statistics are very well chosen and placed.
I'm glad that you chose to remove the last 3 paragraphs of text for your final piece. Although the paragraphs were also strong and interesting, I felt that they did not contribute to what made your photo essay so gripping.
Well done!
Katrina
Kelsey,
ReplyDeleteI really like the personal aspect of your photo essay. The poetry you've written/ selected provides strong accompaniment to the photographs and the piece overall. I almost feel as if the poem is a set of pictures speaking out to the reader, grasping them by the way you describe yourself and the other. I also really enjoy the content this essay is projecting. The video with facts is a strong way to get a point across, but in my eyes your poetry sends a much stronger message.
Kelsey,
ReplyDeleteI just love this piece. I think it's a real work of art with a social purpose, and the photographs are beautiful and creative. You've really made the paint effective as a tool here, and the play you have with it works so well - the point when your subject (hooray Emily Jo!) wipes off the paint is so powerful, and such a moment of reclamation.
“Paint” as a metaphor for “bruising” is so interesting too: it’s at once more visibly permanent than a bruise, but also it becomes here a metaphor of growth that challenges the almost permanent sense that comes with terms like “bruised” or “damaged” when applied to people, and in this case especially to women. What I mean is, while a bruise is temporary, being a “bruised woman” sounds permanent, and it carries with it this sense that somehow that “bruised” or “damaged” part is a central aspect of character forever after. So, paint at the beginning is a metaphor for the physical bruise, and it’s disfiguring, violent, and not quite silencing (in this way the scream works as a nice transition). At the end, paint seems to be shifting to become a metaphor about the psychological bruising, which makes the act of wiping it away a very important move – a claim of agency and humanity that exists outside of the violence that existed to silence and overwhelm. It’s just so great, and creative, and interesting. I love getting pieces like this…
At about the 3:18 moment, after the statistic about sexual assault mostly occurring by people known to the victim, you cut back to a photo of Emily Jo smiling. It jars me every time I watch it, because it doesn’t match up with the sort of rhythm you’ve established to the piece, where the photographs and statistics comment on each other. We’ve got a sense of agency at that point becoming developed – the previous photo is her starting to wipe off the paint, though it’s not quite clear yet at that point, and you’re establishing at that point the most important theme of your piece, about refusing to let such experiences to determine one’s life and character. The smile is a central aspect of that – it’s the first warmth on the faces that to that point have seemed either mute or expressing pure rage, and it’s important. But it feels weird to me, coming right after that stat. It’s like the statistics don’t keep up with the story of transformation you are putting forth.
It occurs to me, too, that that sort of tension, between words and photos at that point, can also act as an important corrective to the visual narrative you are positing. That is, it would be a mistake to finish this piece and feel super great that everything is okay now because women have the power to take back their own lives and isn’t that wonderful. Perhaps it matters to keep that tension in there, to assert the problem not in the almost individual terms of a woman’s possibility to recover, but to remember that you are speaking about a social crisis that remains under-reported, misrepresented, shaming for women, and taboo as something to speak about.
The poem is interesting too, and plays with that same tension. Your piece demands the individual voice, not only in the person of the women in your photographs, but in the experience you include. It is a dramatic assertion of this as a large scale social problem that is experienced in millions of individual ways, that these individual experiences are at once reflective of that crisis, and completely unique as the lived experience of two or more people in a complex human relationship.
I could go on. Thanks for putting this together. Seeing things like this getting created in a class I am teaching makes me love walking to the classroom – I know I’ll be surprised, excited, and engaged by the ideas my students share with me. That’s a nice job to have.
(There’s a great profile of Elizabeth Smart in the recent New Yorker; you’d like it I think. It connects to some of your thinking here.)
Kirk