For our photographic narratives course, we’ve been asked to respond to Let us now praise famous men by James Agee and Walker Evans. The book includes Evans photos (see below) and Agee’s writing which borders on poetry in syntax. Throughout my reading I hear Agee’s apology to the family and people he met while on […]

For the photography class, we’re taking before (middle) and after photos. You can see my Americana post below for a window into my family and childhood home. This series is from a Bikram yoga class.

Although Rockwell painted and I’m photographing, and although I’m only documenting my family, I feel an odd channeling of Rockwellian (that’s a word?) Americana. At the same time, there are classic NE Ohio Italian-American tells on the table, including the “authentic” parmesan, salad, and a bbq chicken take on lasagna. Or maybe that’s just my […]

Photographing people where I don’t belong (as per a recent Photo assignment) reflected my own expectations of State College. The first location I scouted Sunday afternoon, near dusk, was the liquor store, just before closing, hoping to get a shot through the glass of them closing up. I don’t belong in a liquor store after […]

I feel as though I’m circling around my methodology for my dissertation. I have narrowed it to ethnography, of which I’m familiar from my background in anthropology. From there, I am looking at visual ethnography, because it allows me to use new (and kinda cool) tools to document and elicit. Plagens, in his article on […]

For my first assignment for Photographic Narrative, I attended and photographed a course from the Osher Lifelong Institute and the Penn State Tea Institute about the history of tea. The below shots focus on the protagonist of my narrative, Ryan, who led the class through a short lecture, tea tasting, and extensive question and answer […]

This blog post is for Photographic Narratives, a course I am auditing at Penn State. The assignment is to write a response to In Africa: The Art of Listening by Henning Makell. Makell begins his story speaking of his own journey to Mozambique, where he has settled for the past 25+ years. In light of […]