This photo sequence was supposed to be my final set for my Visual Storytelling Through Landscape class. We were to tell a story with 10 landscape photographs shot in Golden Gate Park from 3-4 different visits. I shot just over 1000 photographs in four shoots, so editing them down to 10 was very difficult (hellish, one might say). But these are the ones I settled on to tell my story:
Don’t get it? Don’t worry, neither did anyone else.
(It’s also hard to see the people in every photo at this resolution.)
The story I was trying to tell was about the infinite ways we spend time passing through the park, and how we are changed in the process. The only way I could illustrate this with the images I had was through a sequence that reflected a passage through life – from birth/childhood, through adulthood and parenthood, and into old age. And in trying to tell all of this it probably failed to show any of it. Simultaneously too literal and devoid of emotion.
But that’s ok, because once the teacher asked me one simple question, I started to realize what it was really all about. He asked, “What is your relationship to the people in these photographs?” My first reaction was “none” – they were all total strangers – but I knew as soon as I said it that I was wrong. Of course it was all about my life and experience, what else could it be? It was about me, my parents, and the death of my mother (she passed away three years ago last month). After that, I don’t dislike the sequence anymore, or see it as the failure I thought it was. Maybe it’s a new beginning. It’s certainly one way, for me, of passing through the loss, and moving forward.
Matt Ball Photography 