Course: Citizen 110 Spaces for Seeing (Fall 2019)
I took Spaces for Seeing in the Fall of 2019 and it was the first honors course I took at Longwood University. I chose the course because I am interested in and appreciative of art, though I do not consider myself to have a lot of artistic ability when it comes to painting or creating most forms of art. This class taught me different ways to look at art and think about its purpose.
During this course, the class was given a photo project based on a prompt every one or two weeks. We were rarely given specific guidelines as to how the project needed to be done, and this was purposeful in order to give us more freedom to take the prompt and interpret it in our own ways. At first this was somewhat difficult because I worried that I was doing these projects “incorrectly”, but there truly was no incorrect way to take these prompts. It gave me more freedom to take the prompts and create something based off of it that was specifically meaningful to me that I wanted to share. This kind of freedom is incredibly unique in an academic setting and I felt that it made the class discussions so interesting. Each student would be given the same prompt but would often create something so different compared to other students on the class based off of their perspective and interpretation of the project idea. Everyone would usually have something to present that they were interested in or passionate about, and it gave us a space to share these ideas with others.
One of the prompts was a “sense of place” where each photo we took needed to have a similar “place”. I decided to take this both literally and somewhat metaphorically. I wanted to create a project specifically about the harmful beauty standards for women. All the photos I took were taken in bathrooms, which was the more literal place, while I wanted to portray how women are given a specific “place” or role in society as to how they are meant to look or act.
Here are some of my photos from my “Sense of Place” project: