The theme of my project was how people spend so much time trying to get the “right angle” that they don’t enjoy the moment. I made a polaroid frame and asked two of my friends if they would reenact some of their favorite memories for me. In order to emphasize my point of focusing on what is happening in front of oneself I made sure that my phone’s camera focus was on the polaroid frame rather than the humans in the picture. If you look at the photos you get a general idea of what is going on in the photo, but without the focus or the context you can not fully grasp the situation.

I posted these photos on Instagram because it is a photo oriented social media platform and people generally put a lot of time into what photos they post on Instagram. All of my photos I posted recieved likes, but none of them recieved a big response in the comments. The comments were more along the lines of “cool picture” or “nice idea”.

For my performance photographs, I decided that I wanted to do something that captured the reactions of my friends in a situation. For my project, I decided that I wanted to make them feel uncomfortable. I would ask the person if I could take a portrait of them for my art class, and once I had them all set, I would say, “oh, you look kind of fat right now”. The photographs came from their reactions to what I had just said. I got a range of reactions, most of them being shocked or laughing. When choosing subjects, I chose my friends who knew my sense of humor and knew that I didn’t actually mean what I had said, but were still shocked by it. After I took the photographs, I would tell my friend what my project was, and they loved the idea and wanted to see what their pictures looked like.

I decided to upload the images to twitter, using the repeating caption of “Right before this I told them that they looked fat #part_”. I had 9 subjects over all, so I decided that I was going to break it up into 3 separate tweets. The first two tweets had four subject’s pictures, and the last tweet had four pictures of the same subject, but was taken in succession to each other.  After a few hours after posting to twitter, my friends had favorited the tweets.

The part about the project that I liked the most was the range of reactions my friends had. I also liked this because it is difficult to guess the context of the photo if you didn’t know it.