Picture Essay

To be honest, I really don’t know if I liked this project. At first I had no idea what I wanted to do which was my first difficulty of this whole thing. Then when I was out on Tuesday night, I thought it would have been a great idea to document a night out with my friends, but that ended up being a drunken mess and I thought to myself that it would be best to not document that night. The pictures would have been funny though. Then I tried to think of other ideas, but everything that I thought of seemed stupid. I finally came up with documenting my last night working at Buffalo Wild Wings. After 3 long years, it would be great to take pictures of my last closing shift bartending. Well, little did I know there was an Illini game. I was kind of frusterated in the beginning because I was hoping for an easy, laid back last shift, but I was wrong. We ended up being really busy even though it was a low scoring game and we lost. I felt that the pictures I took represented a big part of my college life because the people that I worked with ended up becoming my family along with all the regulars that come in all the time. However, taking pictures from my iphone was not the greatest device to use but I had nothing else since I recently just broke my 2nd camera. I tried to take pictures of things or events that I would come across on a regular shift and not just that night. Everyone thought I was crazy because they had no idea what I was doing until I tried to explain it them. Also, I tried to take more realistic pictures and more actions pictures but it was hard because people would try and pose for the camera.
After reading Berger, I realize where he is coming from when he says, “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually became evident that an image could outlast what it represented.” These pictures might not be understood by everyone but to me it means a whole lot more than what meets the eye. It is kind of a conclusion to another chapter in my life because I’ve been there for so long that it was time for me to leave and when I was looking back on these pictures, I was actually sad because it showed the last time I would be closing there. I’ll miss working all the Illini games and being with everyone that I worked with but these pictures to someone else might see something completely different. They might just see random people and signs of beer specials and think nothing of it and probably won’t remember them. Pictures tend to lose their value or uniqueness after awhile too. For example, the picture of the final score of the game was a lot more depressing in the moment and now looking back at the picture, it’s just a bunch of numbers that probably won’t mean anything a week from now. In the end, I’m glad I captured my last night working because it’s pictures that I understand and mean something to me that I wanted to share with others.