Power of the Hood
When brainstorming on what to do for this project, I knew I wanted to do something that not only served as a performative art piece but also included a meaningful narrative behind it. Even though I initially struggled with coming up with an idea to base my photo series one, I enjoyed the freedom of being able to run with whatever idea I finally chose. In this series, I aimed to compare and contrast the reaction of an audience to how different people wore their clothes, hooded sweatshirts to be specific. While these five pictures were taken with my phone and surely do not seem to be of great quality, they surely met my expectations.
The difference in gender, skin color, and overall size between my models surely seemed to impact the way that the surrounding bystanders reacted to their presence. During the process of snapping the hooded vs. unhooded photos of each model, the looks of uncomfort from bystanders tipped the scale toward the photos where the models were told to have their hoods up. You can see in the photos where they are unhooded, no one seems to be paying the models any attention even though they are uncomfortably and awkwardly placed. I posted these pictures on Twitter as a series of 5 photos, and they did not get much of a reaction from my followers. Possibly because the post isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing, or because it is hard to understand what is going on in the photos without an explanation.
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POTH POST
Your analysis seems correct about why you didn’t get as much response on these images on social media. That said, the way you embraced politically charged material and looked to understand the representation of the hoodie really comes through. You are staging the hoodie and only through multiple posts on it can the entire idea become clear. Perhaps, you tried to do a little too much. If you photographed the same person with a hoodie in 5 different locations it might have been clearer for your audience…