Ad Buster

     One of the ads that has bothered me the most that I keep seeing is the anti drug add "Above the Influence". The ad shows a girl who has just done drugs and now appears to have no bones. The add compares marijuana to drugs like cocaine and heroin where I think it should be compared to alcohol and tobacco. The big debate about marijuana right now is whether to regulate it like alcohol and tobacco or not. I think that by putting some facts on the ad, rather than just implying something with a single image, I have increased the power of the ad. The word play with the original ad and the changes to the logo also give strength to the message. Originally, the ad tried to instill a fear of drugs using exaggerated imagery. My ad is more of an appeal to the rationality and health consciousness of people. Where the target audience has not changed from the general "young people", the type of young person that would be attracted by this ad is very different from the original. Instead of advocating avoiding all drugs, this add encourages them to take a look at the drugs that we already interact with and think about the implications to their health.

Personal Photography

In this series, I wanted to capture what my Halloween night was like in 2011. My friends and I decided to have a campfire outside our house because the weather was good. I really wanted to capture how much fun people were having and what we did that night. The idea of Punctum was also something that I was trying to explore, and I feel as though I did pretty well capturing the truth of my friend’s personalities in these pictures. I found that the easiest way to capture the way that someone really is requires not telling them that you are taking their picture. As soon as people know that their picture is being taken, they change their demeanor in a slight but important way. This is especially easy to see in the first photo, where the girl saw that the picture was being taken and looked directly into the camera. With the other photos, the smiles are real.

The ideology of my friends is also something that I wanted to capture. We all decided that this is how we wanted to spend our Halloween night. We wanted to be with close friends having a good time. Things like friendship and happiness are important to us, and I felt as though it should be remembered. If there was one artist that we studied who inspired me to take these photos, it was Eileen Cowin. Though her photos are a more intense dramatization of real life, I believe she wanted to capture something similar in her art. The closeness and passion that her photos convey really made me want to take pictures of my friends. Just as she would set up situations that were not exactly normal, this setting is not exactly an everyday occurrence for us either.