On Longing Assignment

On Longing Assignment 

"The body is the primary mode of perceiving scale." - Susan Stewart, On Longing

When I read this sentence, I immediately thought of my trip to Yosemite. The mountains were huge and looming when in the valley. Once on top of another mountain, though, the other mountains didn't seem quite as grand. In this photo, the use of an arm and hand manipulate the eye's perception of scale and make it seem as though Half Dome was tiny.

"Capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience." - Susan Stewart, On Longing

This sentence made me think of how people use objects to "prove" they did something or went somewhere. In the case of this photo, the sand dollar serves as "proof" that I not only went to the beach, but I stayed there long enough to find a sand dollar.

"The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the three dimensional into the miniature, that which can be enveloped by the body."  - Susan Stewart, On Longing

I immediately thought of this photo when I read this sentence. Polaroids take what we deem important moments and turn them into small keepsakes of a single snapshot. In this case, the history of the lighthouse is dense and great, yet the photograph reduces my experience of that history into a single moment in time.

"To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy."  - Susan Stewart, On Longing

This is another photo from my trip to Yosemite. When we went on a hike, my sister and I found ginormous pinecones and were immediately enthralled because we had never seen one before. Had we not been flying home, I am positive that both of us would have taken one of those pinecones as a keepsake from visiting that "foreign" land. The pinecones definitely would have served as specimen and trophies for us. 

"... the nostalgic input of the handmade in a plastic world."  - Susan Stewart, On Longing

This painting of mine is one of the only handmade things in my dorm room at the time. Being the only handmade thing in the room, it has a lot of memories attached to it, such as what was going on around me when I created it.