Weekly 1 Selfie - Ricky Ochoa

 

Ricky Ochoa, Hanging On, 9/4/2024

This is the definition of trying his hardest to make it during his sophomore year.

Ana Mendieta, Earth Body, 9/4/24

Carrie Mae Weems, Kitchen Table Series, 1990

Ricky Ochoa, Getting through a tough day, 9/4/24

Yesterday was challenging since I was the only guy in class during self-image. I was too shy to talk since I hadn't been in this situation before.

Quotes from Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”

1. "'So tell me baby, what do you know about this great big world of ours?' 'Not a damn thing sugar,' she replies. Viewers may not be able to see the world outside of the kitchen’s walls, but her characters are trying to navigate it all the same."

2. “I think that most work that’s made by Black artists is considered to be about Blackness. Unlike work that’s made by white artists, which is assumed to be universal at its core.”

My Responses

1. The world is a vast place with many people. We can't comprehend everything, so we rely on theories or pragmatism to explain why things are the way they are in whatever pleases us.

2. We are conditioned to believe that white skin is superior and ideal for humanity in general. However when it came to the origins of humanity, people with black skin came first while white skin came last after migration. The reason why it’s that way is because of the Americans planned to rewrite history in their own vision and to gain power over the entire human population by implanting ideas to ensure they stay in power by treating skin color as a better version than other. It became a fact based thing that was secretly shoved into our minds without notice and cause division against humanity by not knowing that it’s opinions in the first place.

Quotes from Susan Sontag excerpt from On Photography

1. "Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced."

2. "Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it."

My Responses

1. Photographs can be manipulated and reproduced for fashion purposes, to find evidence, or to create a collage of family or couple photos.

2. Photographs are often more recognizable for providing evidence to a specific cause or to cause misleading information if manipulated.