Medium Specificity Project - "Only a Piece"

Only a Piece - Photograph by Emma Larsen

I spent a long time brainstorming which type of media I wanted to explore, and once I thought I had decided, I spent even longer trying to think of how I wanted to use that medium to explore specific elements of that medium. I had decided to make a podcast-style audio piece, recording small sounds to explore what I could (or could not) do with just the voice recorder on my phone. However, as you can see, this is not what I ended up with. In fact, I got frustrated and gave up, and somehow in my frustration I wound up scrolling through my Instagram feed. 

Well, I guess frustration leads to learning because I found myself thinking about social media and the affordances and limitations of Instagram—the single pictures and simple captions that can show us both so much and so little about someone. I was reminded of how easy it can be to compare ourselves (in all our complexity and depth) with the intentional and manicured social media image of someone else. We all do it. Even as I see more and more commentary on Instagram from people acknowledging how little we can really see through this lens, I still find myself making comparisons and wasting time. I find that I have to remind myself often that we only see a piece of the picture.

This is how this photograph—which I have titled “only a piece”—was born. I decided that I would use photography to comment on what it means to only see a piece of the picture, as is true not only for social media, but for all photography. As I went to create this picture, I had recently cleaned out my desk, so I had a bag of trash sitting on my floor waiting to be taken out. Somehow that bag of trash looked to me like a fun subject for my photography exploration, and I started getting different markers and pens and writing “you only get a piece of the picture” all over different pieces of garbage. The variety was exciting to me, as photography often highlights texture and color well. I also started exploring different ways I could lay out all this trash, concealing pieces so that not only are you only seeing a small piece of my desk and my life, but within the picture there are certain things that are concealed from view, as well. This picture might tell you a lot about me and what was in my desk, but there are small stories behind each of these items that viewers will likely never know, and that’s an exciting representation of both photography and social media to me.

I also thought of some questions I might use to help students respond to photography:

• What do you see? What do you not see?
• What stands out to you in this picture? What might the photographer have wanted you to look at? Why?
• What story/stories is/are being told through this photograph? 
• What questions do you wish you could ask the photographer?
• What does this photograph make you think about? How does it make you feel?
• If there is a caption, what does the caption reveal that you couldn’t know by just looking at the picture? How does this influence your ‘reading’ of the photograph?