This is a very special project to me for a lot of reasons. When I had the idea for it, it came like a flash in the night, and I began scribbling ideas and drawing diagrams, and felt like I had come up with an ambitious idea that would be challenging to me to achieve. The idea was initially to photograph 100 people, or 99 and myself, over the course of the semester. And in addition to the photographs, I would interview each person. I would ask them only 2 simple questions: What are some issues you are facing in your every day life? and If you were to describe life in one word, what would if be?

I started shooting early on, but found that the more I kept shooting, the more issues would start appearing with the work that had already been done. That is to say, that as I kept shooting, certain rules began to arise - I decided to start having everyone look into the camera since nearly everyone was already, I would not be using any group photos, the portraits had to be single individuals, and finally, I decided that I was only going to use the ones that I had shot in standard, horizontal landscape, the couple of vertical shots just had to go.

So, as I kept shooting, and reshooting, I began to realize that even with all of the work I was putting into it, I was not going to be able to reach 100 people before the final project day. I decided that I could scale back to 50. I drew out a diagram, where I drew out all 50 squares in neat little rows and realized how big of a challenge 50 would still be, but one that I could certainly meet if I really applied my efforts.

The last day before I was to present it, I still had to go shoot 8 people. Most of whom I had already arranged times later in the evening in which to shoot them. I was certain that the finished goal was within reach. I had begun receiving messages from strangers, offering to allow me to come shoot them, I'd been asked if I was going to be selling prints from the project, and so on. It was shocking to me how suddenly it had built up momentum - people were having me come over to their homes to shoot them and all of their roommates, or inviting over friends that would be willing to participate. It was really fantastic to see happen; a lot of people were very eager to work together to make something interesting occur.

I'd taken Blackbox2 this semester, where we've discussed the pedagogical aspects of the ACTLab. In these discussions, we talked about how ideally, students will reach a point where they put so much into their projects, that the projects begin to push back. And I began to realize that in working on this project, I had finally put together a project that was seriously pushing me back. So, rather than creating a boring radioplay as my final Blackbox project, I had come up with a way to present a lot of the stuff generated working on this and my other final project this semester, that I felt would be a stronger presentation and an opportunity to share content that I not only still liked, but also that still had meaningful character - it's only flaw being that I couldn't use it in this project for one reason or another. Part of the blackbox presentation was putting together the large display board, which I would be using the following day, again (modified), for this project. Normally, it is a little more difficult to legitimately blame one project's disaster for another project's shortcomings, but then again, normally mistakes in my projects don't cause me to spend the evening in the emergency room getting stitches.

So, since my display board cut my wrist open rather than worked admirably as a staging ground for this very project, I had to rethink how I would be presenting the content of this project to the class all over again. Initially I was going to mount all of the pictures on one display board, and project people's 1 word life description words along with all of the portraits. Only now with no mount, I also had no good way to project all of the words either. So, I moved all of the photos to the walls of the actlab and on the stage, taped to chalkboards. I acquired large sidewalk chalk and wrote the words of my interviewees on the walls of the room, and I began looping the 12 minute long accompanying audio piece.

Regardless of how generally disappointed I was with the actual presentation, due to the unforeseen last minute bleeding all over the place issues that came up, I am far from generally disappointed with the content I have been collecting. The more people I have shot the better I have felt about the results. I am planning to continue shooting until I reach my original goal, I had such a positive time shooting the first 44 that I feel like I need to do the rest. I realize that I said I had to shoot another 8 the night before, but the total I just gave was 6 short. I did manage to shoot the doctor who stitched me up and the nurse that bandaged it afterward. By that point, I couldn't not shoot the two of them. Ideally, in this arrangement, the photos would have been much bigger. I still believe that in the originally intended presentation format, that the small, 4X6s that I had printed up would have been completely appropriate. Alas, I had to make compromises. Also, I'd like to not use chalk ever again.

So Here it is, my slice of life project. The voices you hear in the accompanying audio were recorded directly from my helpful participants. I am eternally grateful to all of them for all of their help.

Here is a list of each participant's words to describe life:

And here are the portraits, currently.