By Diego Teixeira Setton

The story I choose to tell works best with only these four images. I understand that this assignment requires me to show eight total pictures, and I will provide them by the end of this article, but my intended vision is best fit to using only the four photographs above. (The eight final pictures still work great within the theme).

It wasn’t easy to find the word to describe the theme of my curated images; the first thing that came to mind was “nothingness”, and as much as I liked that, it didn’t really fit with the college life proposal this assignment had. After thinking for a bit I decided upon “loneliness”, which in my opinion doesn’t differ much from what I originally had in mind.

I guess the story I intended to show was that of a trip. To where exactly I don’t know, all the sceneries seem to be surrounded by this eerie white void, the images purposefully have this dreamy ambience which make them a little bit discomforting. Who is taking the trip is also up in the air, it could be you, the viewer; it could be the cat or the woman who in a way are looking at each other. But you can’t really say for sure. Maybe they fought, maybe they miss the other, maybe they never even met…

All you know is that they’re one of the few characters in this empty world that seems devoid of people and color, almost as you were there by yourself, you are definitely present but no one seems to notice. If I had to pick a soundtrack for this universe, I would pick “Ditto” by NewJeans.

That’s my view of it, at least, that is what the images represent to me. My feelings towards them are a consequence of my own feelings and state of mind, for other people it might be different, there’s no right or wrong answers when it comes to interpretation. It may differ from the view of the author, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They are personal to one’s own.

This class really helped me realize what I said in the previous paragraph, from the very start, beginning with the pictures I took in New York during winter break. I would bring in pictures to the professor and he would grade them based on a completely different perspective from what I had in mind.

At first it was really frustrating, because an image that I deemed to be great would be completely tossed aside by Ross, or he would, from my perspective, completely miss the point of it. But with time I realized that’s just the way it is, no two people will ever look at one thing exactly the same, and coming to terms with this really helped me in the way I look at my own photographs. (I can’t stress enough how much it helped me with selecting what to post on Instagram).

As I mentioned before, this class really helped me realize how different people look at the same image. It helped me to think a little bit about; what I wanna show when I start a new film, what are the things I wanna capture, and how can I build a cohesive world with the results that I achieved.

Even if I try to make a mind plan of what I wanna do, I won’t know the vibes of a roll of film until after I developed it, so to me it is really important to learn how to organize what I got based on the results, and not from the moment you click the photo. In our countless ethic discussions, I came to the conclusion that the first thing you need to do is click the button, everything else comes later.

Compared to the assignments that I worked on before, the thing that I believe to have improved the most is just that, cohesion. Especially while working with film, I prefer it when you have to carefully think about every photo you take compared to digital, where you can just shoot away.

I still need to improve on being more shameless when taking pictures of someone; I’m working on that.

Lastly, here is the story curated to include eight photograph, you might find them to be a bit different but the basic idea remains the same.

I guess that here the story changes a bit no? Maybe someone is going to meet a friend, overcoming their loneliness…