It’s
the first day of ARTS 2171, and I begin with the routine most everyone shares when
walking into a new classroom. Unsure if I’m even in the right place, I look
around for a friend or a familiar face from another class to ask “this is photo
1, right?”. The next twenty students to walk into the classroom do the same
dance: hesitantly open door, look for a friend, find a seat. Our instructor
walks in, introduces himself as the graduate student leading this section of
photo 1, and tells us to get out a piece of paper. Just like that, “Hey, I’m
Adrian, I’m the grad student leading this section of photo 1. Everyone get out
a piece of paper.”
As
we pull out our notebooks, he continues. “We’re going to make a list of all the
bullshit cliché photos you can think of.” He is brusque, to say the least.
I’m
somewhat caught off-guard. He doesn’t ask how our summer was, or hand out the
syllabus. Thankfully at least one other person in the class is too, and they
sheepishly raise their hand to ask for clarification on what he means by
“cliché”.
“C’mon
guys, you know, cliché. You’ve seen
it before, its unoriginal, it’s overdone.
If someone put it on the wall for critiques, you’d roll your eyes.”
Another
slow forty five seconds roll by before someone says, “a photo of cool shadows
on the ground?”, more question than statement. “YES. Let’s hear some more.”
A few of the more candid
students voice things like “a photo of a kid swinging on a swing-set?”, and
“close-up photos of flowers?” The cliché ideas start coming faster with
confirmation we’re on the right track, just be specific about content.
“Hobos on Pearl
St.”
“Kids
skateboarding on campus”
“A dude playing his guitar”
“Performers on
Pearl St.”
“Sunsets”…”be more
specific”…”sunsets over the Flatirons?”
“Girls all posing
in front of the bathroom mirror”
“A couple kissing
in the rain”
“Everyone waiting
in line outside a music venue under the marquee”
“Little kids
playing in the sand at the beach”
We continue with
our list, everyone laughs and some students even start to poke mild jabs at
their friends as they shout out “photos of your pro-skier friends” and
“pictures of your girlfriend trying to be a swimsuit model”. I laugh with
everyone else, but at the end of our list I review the twenty-some clichés
we’ve put together, and I feel the heat and color of my face turn up in the
same manner that someone turns on a stove.
“I don’t want to see
one single fuckin’ photo, or even a photo remotely close to any of these on
this list submitted this semester. It will be an automatic fail, and a waste of
our time”.
I panic. I’ve
snapped three quarters of these photographs, and until this point, was
incredibly proud of them even if it was in high school. I wholly identified
myself as a photographer, to hear the work I’d been fulfilled with was simple
and cliché began brewing an amazing insecurity. I must be without originality.
I created trite content on a bland background, maybe it was decently good
photograph but it was something everyone had seen before. I keep panicking.
“Pull ideas for
your work from the nitty gritty, don’t take a picture of something because it’s
pretty. Take a photograph of
something.”
What is that even
supposed to mean? I keep panicking. I tune out Adrian and start to create a new
list of clichés, all of them about myself, until the list is long enough that I
can’t remember a single unique thing about who I am anymore.
“White girl, raised
in upper middle class white suburbia.”
“Cheerleader,
cheer captain”.
“Has a few friends
that are girls, but always got along better with boys.”
“Lost her virginity to an older boy in hopes
of making him like her more.”
“Rebellious, but
only to the point of no permanent consequences.”
“Does yoga.”
I understand what
Adrian is trying to do by calling out these dry and overdone photographs, I understand
he’s trying to push us. Being pushed creates anxiety, uncertainty, self-doubt, and
eventually something new. I carry both lists with me today, permanently written
on my psyche to infuse the insecurity that still haunts me, that fear of being so
unoriginal that all I am is a collection of clichés, with a sense of motivation
and intention to be anything but a simple stereotype.
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