Before I dig in to how the glitching process went for me, let me explain my photo choice. I chose this photo because I wanted to find a photo that showed at least one person expressing an emotion. I chose this picture because it doesn’t just show one person, it shows three children each with their own emotion being conveyed. During the 1930s nearly every family (if not all families) were affected by the great depression and this photo depicts the children of a family with clothes that look somewhat old and no shoes. The photo also shows that the family lives on a farm in the middle of the dust bowl so you can see that there’s no crops coming growing thus the family can’t provide for themselves.
From a historical standpoint, I began to ask how badly did the great depression affect every American family. I ask this because you see photos from that time period and you can see candid photos of families going through rough times and dealing with poverty and on the other hand see families still have smiles and look happy as if nothing has changed for them. Hung and Popp state that to explore our historical question one should “look for interesting correlations between factors” and “constantly ask yourself: Why then? Why there?” 1 . These methods allow us to dig deeper into the photos and extract more information than what the photographer intended to share with the world. I personally found the “interesting correlation” method to be more useful for the reason that the “ask yourself” method can get you so far when analyzing a photo.
This method of finding interesting correlations between what I see and what I read is more useful because it gives more insight into the picture since you can then connect the reading to the photograph in ways you couldn’t do by just simply asking “why then? why there?” I was able to draw that my original analysis is mostly correct as the Farm Security Administration or FSA had published the photo to show what families in rural area were going through.
After being able to analyze the picture can the fun part which was glitching the photo. The idea of taking an image and essentially “glitching” it was a newfound idea to me. It was a fun assignment, but it did come with its difficulties such as trying to do the whole “glitching” process on windows processor. Overcoming that challenge took some time but in the end the original photo and the glitched one are ones to enjoy.
http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/172
http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/zion-rowe–3-children-sitting-
