For Saturday
I planned to watch Foxy Brown and Jackie Brown however I was screaming in pain and my mother and boyfriend took me to the emergency room. There I was diagnosed with a Urinary Tract Infection that was causing me a fever, headaches, pain and weird sensations throughout my body. Therefore, I could not get any of the work done that I had hoped.
To back track a little bit, I also visited the International Center of Photography’s museum where I really saw my love of photography realized. Lena Herzog’s exhibit Lost Souls depicted “mostly infants born with genetic defects that prevented their survival.” I gasped in disbelief and was shocked at the presented images. It was so powerful that the infants shone through their death. Ed Templeton’s “tense observations of the chaotic lives of suburban youth” was also shocking. It had photographs showing things such as a man peeing blood and two pre-pubescent children making out. I could not believe my eyes. The last exhibit that I viewed turned out to be important to my life and history as a whole. I saw For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights. It “explores the historic role of visual culture in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for racial equality and justice in the United States from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s.” This was significant because it 1. Explored Visual Culture 2. Explored the culture of my people 3. Forced me to look at aspects of my culture that I was fearful of or tried to forget (by viewing photos of lynchings and the like). As I walked through that exhibit I was transformed. I actually cried most of the time, and saw things that made me laugh and feel proud. One of the last things I saw was a video of Malcolm X on television where he refused to tell a committee of white men his last name. When they tried to force him he simply kept replying that his last name is the name passed down from his great-grandfather’s master and that he would not take it on. He said that his father did not know his last name and that to empower himself he took on the last name X. It was wonderful to watch.
Note: All quotes were taken from http://www.icp.org/site/c.dnJGKJNsFqG/b.732135/k.D880/Museum.htm.
