Personal Photo Analysis For 19 years, this photo of myself as a child posing with my grandmother has sat on my shelf. Growing up, my grandmother was an integral part of my life. For a majority of my life, she lived in an apartment above our garage. Without a doubt, I spent more of my childhood with her than anyone else. She was a role model and above all else a close friend. I do not remember this photo being taken, nor do I remember where I was when this photo was taken, but the contingency of photography forces me to recognize that the referent of this photograph truly occurred. Immediately, this photo speaks to the strong relationship between me and my grandmother, which in this case is the photographs studium. Anyone glancing at this photograph …show more content…
My grandmother passed away on March 15, 2012, at age 94. She was a remarkably wise and compassionate woman who brought joy to those whose lives she touched. In seeing a visible representation of my relationship with my grandmother, I am forced to confront both her life and her death simultaneously. I cannot separate my memories of her throughout my childhood with the knowledge that she has passed away. Furthermore, I can physically see her represented in this photograph just as I remember seeing her in life, but I know that this is just an image. A flat death forever preserves our embrace to the paper comprising this photograph, and this paper has lived on, having had its own life amongst my other belongings on a shelf in my room. The spectrum of the photograph powerfully emanates from the frame as both a hazy memory and an instant in time. Since I do not recognize the background of this photograph, it is possible that it was taken at our first home (which we moved from when I was three), or it is possible it was taken at my grandmother’s apartment. Regardless of the unrecognizable setting, the nature of photography demands that what was captured undoubtedly occurred at some point in time, and that this meaning extends beyond what is denotationally
In the poem “Unveiling” by Linda Pastan, the speaker's point of view is from an older woman who is walking through a cemetery and admiring her deceased family members. Pastan uses allusion, enjambment and imagery to display to the reader what the speaker is feeling and thinking, as she explores her family members’ graves.
I glance amusedly at the photo placed before me. The bright and smiling faces of my family stare back me, their expressions depicting complete happiness. My mind drifted back to the events of the day that the photo was taken. It was Memorial Day and so, in the spirit of tradition my large extended family had gathered at the grave of my great grandparents. The day was hot and I had begged my mother to let me join my friends at the pool. However, my mother had refused. Inconsolable, I spent most of the day moping about sulkily. The time came for a group picture and so my grandmother arranged us all just so and then turned to me saying, "You'd better smile Emma or you'll look back at this and never forgive yourself." Eager to please and knowing she would never let it go if I didn't, I plastered on a dazzling smile. One might say a picture is worth a thousand words. However, who is to say they are the accurate or right words? During the 1930s, photographers were hired by the FSA to photograph the events of the Great Depression. These photographers used their images, posed or accurate, to sway public opinion concerning the era. Their work displayed an attempt to fulfill the need to document what was taking place and the desire to influence what needed to be done.
The funeral was supposed to be a family affair. She had not wanted to invite so many people, most of them strangers to her, to be there at the moment she said goodbye. Yet, she was not the only person who had a right to his last moments above the earth, it seemed. Everyone, from the family who knew nothing of the anguish he had suffered in his last years, to the colleagues who saw him every day but hadn’t actually seen him, to the long-lost friends and passing acquaintances who were surprised to find that he was married, let alone dead, wanted to have a last chance to gaze upon him in his open coffin and say goodbye.
A moment in time that I hold close to myself is the funeral of my grandmother. It occurred a couple of weeks ago on the Friday of the blood drive. The funeral itself was well done and the homily offered by the priest enlightened us with hope and truth. But when the anti-climatic end of the funeral came my family members and relatives were somberly shedding tears. A sense of disapproval began creeping into my mind. I was completely shocked that I did not feel any sense of sadness or remorse. I wanted to feel the pain. I wanted to mourn, but there was no source of grief for me to mourn. My grandma had lived a great life and left her imprint on the world. After further contemplation, I realized why I felt the way I felt. My grandmother still
Most parents want to capture their children's back-to-school moments on film. The only problem with this is that most children get upset at the mere idea of posing for that back-to-school picture, and will do the best that they can to avoid it. If and when you do succeed in getting your child to pose for that picture and look happy, he or she would already have lost the polished look that you worked so hard to achieve. There is a secret on how to make this ritual more tolerable and less of a chore for kids. A little planning goes a long way towards letting you take that precious photograph without upsetting your kids.
passed away” holds a significantly sombre and melancholy tone. This is juxtaposed to the living
Death is sometimes considered unthinkable. People do not wish to think of loved ones dying. When someone close to us dies we are over come with sadness. We wish we had more time with them. Their death shows us the importance of that person’s role in our lives. We begin to think of how we will live our lives without them. We think of all the moments we shared with them, they live again in our memories. Perhaps death is considered unthinkable because we fe...
As I walked through the door of the funeral home, the floral arrangements blurred into a sea of vivid colors. Wiping away my tears, I headed over to the collage of photographs of my grandfather. His smile seemed to transcend the image on the pictures, and for a moment, I could almost hear his laughter and see his eyes dancing as they tended to do when he told one of his famous jokes. My eyes scanned the old photographs, searching for myself amidst the images. They came to rest on a photo of Grandpa holding me in his lap when I was probably no more than four years old. The flowers surrounding me once again blended into an array of hues as I let my mind wander……
“Death is the debt every man must pay”, wrote Euripides. Each day we are reminded about death; a report on the television about starving children in Africa or a suicide bomber in the Middle East. Headline in the newspaper about a murder, suicide or “honor killings”; News of an untimely death from a loved one, friend, co-worker. It seems that death is everywhere. Until this essay was assigned I had never really thought about how death had affected me, or how close I was to that deceased person who had died so suddenly, sometimes without even saying goodbye. Now thinking about it I have actually been around death quite a bit in my short life so far; a long with that I have sat through many sad funerals. How close I was to that person is a whole other story though. Even when it comes to my own family I wasn’t always that close to them when they passed on because they lived in another state, or my parents weren’t very close to them so I wasn’t really ever around them enough to know them or develop an attachment.
A complaint for copyright infringement regarding two songs “Amazing” by Harrington and Leonard and “Photograph” by Ed Sheeran and John McDaid has been made along with a demand for a jury trial on June 8, 2016. The defendants’, Edward Christopher Sheeran, John McDaid, Ed Sheeran Limited and labels such as Sony have made deliberate infringement of “Amazing”. They have harmed the plaintiffs, HaloSongs, Martin Harrington, and Thomas Leonard as Harrington and Leonard were not properly credited for their contributions to “Photograph.” The chorus of “Photograph” has a number of simlarites as “Amazing”. This essay analyses both the songs choruses and will prove that the original has been copied to a reasonable degree.
The desire to stop time and preserve the way things were are the primary reasons why the majority of photography in the late nineteenth century focused on documenting dying traditions, practices, and ways of life...
Post-mortem photography was once a very popular American practice in the mid to late 19th century, and it was considered a healthy practice by families grieving for their loved ones. Such photographs were labeled memento mori, remembrance photographs, or memorial photographs rather than simply post-mortem photos. Since the invention of the daguerreotype process, “portrait photographers offered postmortem photos as a special service” (Hilliker 247). Often, only the upper half of the corpse would be photographed, but it was also common for full-body pictures to be taken where the corpse would be shown as seated or sleeping, sometimes with family members posed alongside them (Hilliker 247-250). The photographs were commonly “mounted on walls in parlors and bedrooms,” and were also kept i...
My niece walked up to the tree to sing a song while my uncle spread her ashes, and we all sat on the trailer awaiting her final departure. She started to sing, and then the ashes flew. It was windy that day and it carried her ashes much further than intended; this made me very emotional. I kept thinking, “that’s my grandma; she’s just a pile of dust flying in the air.” I began to cry hysterically to the point where I couldn’t breathe or see. “She was a person, I could have spent more time with her, what if she didn’t know how much I loved her?”, were the words that kept repeating in my mind. My whole family was in shock at how badly I was taking it, especially since I was not close to her. I, myself, couldn’t even grasp why it was tearing me apart so badly, and then it hit me; she died knowing that I had gone nowhere in my life; she died and was never able to feel proud of me; she died with the belief I will always be the person I was. This was the turning point that would change my life
There are some events that can be seized in a camera and kept forever. Family photographs are generally kept stored at one place. No one actually bothers to edit them while presenting them to others. Folks like to see themselves just how they are when they were small. However, for proficient photographers, this is not the scenario. They do not sell family photographs. Their market is all about selling only professional photographs. Hence, these specialists cannot afford to portray raw photographs without any editing. Since the whole world would be eyeing at their creativity, they have to retouch photographs so that they look outstanding and attention-grabbing.
“When photography was invented it was thought to be an equivalent to truth, it was truth with a capital ‘T’.” Vicki Goldberg