Looking back....

 Nostalgia: My instagram

The concept of nostalgia is very relevant and also very interesting. Below are two quotes that I pulled from the Jurgenson text.

"The social photo initiates a process of documenting life so that you know how to see life when away from the screen" (27)

This concept was interesting to me because in a way, the work that I am trying to do is simply a form of nostalgic documentation that I could hopefully look back on and replicate the emotions I felt at that time. My own posts are a form of "hey look at what I saw" type of nostalgia. I also think of this as interesting because a lot of the reason that I take personal images of things that I experience otherwise is because I want to be able to increase my memory and retention of real life events.... I want to remember exactly what happened. I think that in this way, social photography becomes a nostalgic documentation of what you have done.

"We learn to intuit in real time the potential popularity of something that might be shared, to see the virality with out eyes and then inside the frame" (38)

I also thought that this quote was interesting because it suggests that we are primed to view the world through a social media lens. By this I mean that we are looking for the post-ability and acceptability of our current life (i.e., will people think what I did was cool/ how can I show them it was cool). I think that it makes posts sort of unauthentic in a way because it's not what we see... its what we want others to see. I think of it like when your mom tells you to clean the house when it is already clean ... she is looking at what she is seeing through the eyes of whoever is coming over. It creates this strange relationship between fact and fiction. The replication of nostalgia may eventually become real however, it may be inaccurately synthesized within social media.

In my own work... I do take into consideration how I will look back on the posts. I think that I also do that for my regular instagram too though. To me, I understand nostalgia to be this warm feeling that you get when you think of a memory. And I do understand that nostalgia can be manufactured... I do think that it is still important as a way of reflecting. Here are some photos that I have of other photos that bring me the nostalgic "warm" feeling for home and childhood.

My brother and I at the Wisco state fair when I was like 12 or something

This picture isnt too old but I think that the color of the water and blurriness of the image makes it seem older than it is... making the nostalgia more prevalent