Final Project Response

I am still recovering after a long day in Mclellan, but I am trying my hardest to find anything photo related to avoid studying for exams. The initial idea for my final project was really born midway through this semester when we did the project on lying. That project evolved a significant amount and when the end product came along I was unsure as to how it was actually fulfilling the criteria of the lying assignment, but I liked the images. In the critique that day I felt some encouragement to push it further. When the final project reared its head and one of our options was to continue with a project or process from earlier in the semester I immediately thought of the books and my brief study on censorship. From there I knew I needed more, so I explored the possibility of destroying official, government documents. Birth certificates, passports, money, marriage licenses, etc. I thought that the reaction I had gotten from destroying books would be magnified if I worked with things that were literally illegal to manipulate or destruct. I asked around and it seemed like people wouldn't really care if they saw money drawn on or a passport burned up. So, after ultimately wasting a few hours making a mock passport I decided that I wanted to stick to books.

I returned to the controversial literature idea only to find that most of my new ideas, one of which including rolling a joint out of a page of a book, were one liners. I was forced to keep pushing my ideas, shoot without a plan, and simply play. After a class that was set aside as work time I realized that I still didn't really know where I was going to take my idea. That night I stayed up and did what Meg encouraged me to do, even though she told me a few times before I actually did it. I played around with several of the possible directions I could take the project and finally stumbled on the starting point. Cutting out one controversial line of text revealed more text below it, cutting that out reveals more text. I came up with the question, how far does censorship go? From there I thought about not only the written word, but also the spoken word and the actual banning or destruction of the controversial narrative.