Hardworking People

It has been a constant struggle for immigrants who are in America.  Some white Americans believe that immigrants come to America to steal their jobs and take way, as if immigrants are greedy people.  There were a lot of demonstrations in recent years but they all began in 2006 after many immigrant workers heard about a law, HR 4437, which states a lot of things about immigration.  Some things were about border protection and other things, but the cause for the many protests was to show that immigrants are hard workers and all they wish for are basic rights.

 Many of the protests “embodied a basic struggle for dignity and respect for hard working immigrant workers and their families” (Narro & Wong & Shadduck-Hernández).  Immigrants want to accomplish the “American Dream” but is seems that some Americans do not want them to accomplish that.  Many of these parents send their American children to go to school and do better things than them.  They are needed in this country to work the jobs that others do not wish to work and trying to take the idea of “basic” rights won’t help, it’ll only push them more towards the edge of wanting equality and better rights.

For the photographs I took, I wanted to show the hard working part about immigrants.  When I approached them, I did not say immigrants but instead I used the “Latino community” because I did not want to assume that they were all immigrants.  To illustrate the idea that my subjects are hard workers, I took documentary style photographs as they worked.  One was posed because there were no customers and he wasn’t doing anything but the rest are candid.  The photos also depict they are hard workers because the composition within each photo is very close to the subject and the viewer gets enough information about the environment the workers are working in.  Along with that, there are a variety of different subjects doing different things, which shows a community of people trying to make a living.  Majority of the photos that were chosen are portrait shots and environmental portraits because I show the environment in which they work in to show who they are or what they do.

The photographs are connected as a series because they all depict the idea of hard working people.  They are also connected through the style they were shot in.  I think this series could be separated into two series because they were shot in two different stores but it also works as a whole because they show the issue in which I chose.  I don’t think each photo, individually would stand alone unless there was text involved.

I didn’t really think about the form in which they would connect to the content but I think the style, documentary, connects to the content.  If I‘d asked for each individual to pose or look at the camera as I took their photo, the viewer would not believe that the individuals are hard workers at all.  The photos would just be like any other photo of a person.

 

Work Cited

Narro, Victor, Kent Wong, and Janna Shadduck-Hernández. The 2006 Immigrant Uprising: Origins and Future. Vol. 16, No. 1. Joseph S. Murphy Institute, City University of New York, Winter 2007. Print.

Proposal For Final Project

So I have some few ideas for my final project. I still do not know how I will be able to produce the work. My first idea is to photograph women of color who show their identity (or at least how they identify themselves) through their culture or something like that. I think a way I would do this is by having them pose with something that they identify themselves with. One photo I wanted to have a model be “plain” and another having her pose dressed differently.

My second idea was to photograph the Latino community here at Beloit. I wanted to depict the issue that Latino families have about sending their children off to work instead of college. I was thinking that I could photograph families or people in the environments they work in and have it compared to a person who has an education or something. First of all I have to find families willing to do this.

Another idea I got was inspired by the Pixar movie Wall-e. I thought about the issue that technology has brought to people. There seems to be hardly any personal conversations, everything seems to be through text or e-mail.  There also seems to be no phone calls anymore. These are my ideas so far.

Artist Statement Four

In the beginning of this project I did not know what to photograph. I had the idea to photography a “crazy” toy zebra, but it didn’t seem realistic. I was stuck because I had no idea what I could photograph that could be an example of a trace. So I was sitting in my room and I decided to photograph my bed before I cleaned it. Then the idea came to me; photograph other beds that are messy or that show that someone has been there then take another photo with the bed being fixed and the surroundings as well.

The traces I chose to photograph were those that people left on their beds. I thought it would be interesting to see how people’s beds and rooms look when there is no one there or when the person has no company compared to when they are in the room with visitors. At first I wanted to zoom in to the creases that they left on the sheets after getting up from laying down or sitting down. Then I decided to take them from far and capture everything or majority of the things that surrounded the bed. The photographic approach I took was kind of a documentary. I asked all the participants if I may take a photo of their undone beds, so everything was pretty natural. I also used natural lighting. Some had open windows and others had their lights on. I did not want to use flash because I feel that it would have flattened things out and I didn’t want that. I also felt that natural light would feel like the viewer is there, in the room.