Photographs of 19th Century China

Sally Mann

As I was unable to watch Blood Ties at the link our instructor provided, I borrowed a DVD.  I forgot how disappointed, angry, and confused people's reactions to Sally Mann's work make me.  Are they and I looking at the same photographs?  The photographs are honest, confident, and healthy regardless of their nudity.  The work cannot be mistaken for pornography or exploitation.  Go to hell, boring old white people.  Geez.

Henri-Cartier Bresson

Obligatory Wikipedia link

Magnum Photos, Bresson's photojournalism company

Bresson's portfolio at Magnum Photos

This guess is badass.  For being as important to 20 century photography as he is, he is not mentioned in my college art history textbook.  Master of candid and street photography, trained as a painter, inspired by the Surrealists, friend of Gandhi and Henri Matisse, WWII POW, French resistance fighter, philanthropist.  All this and a damn good photographer.

The college secret

I earned my degree in 2011, so it hasn’t been long.   I also have a good memory for everything.   Between these things, I remember college very well including what it was that got me through despite hating some parts of it:

Have fun.

More specifically, allow college to be a fulfilling experience.  This is either the most obvious thing you’ve ever been told or the most absurd.  It’s hoped that everyone in college wants to be there, but this is less common than you think and college is difficult regardless of your intelligence.  For even the devoted, college can be frustrating and boring.  Sometimes, it is better to be challenged if it allows you enjoyment and so you should enroll in the courses that interest you, regardless of how easy or useful.  Unfortunately, you will be required to complete courses that are neither interesting nor useful and, in those cases, you must add your own fun.

For your general education electives, do not take classes just because they are easy.  Easy will not interest you and you will find it infinitely more difficult to perform well if you are bored.  While “Rocks for Jocks” is not the least challenging, reading 50 pages of it per week and writing a paper about it will crush your spirit and you won’t care what grade you receive.  While a junior in my program, I enrolled in two online courses to fulfill my life sciences credits.  My interest was none and I expected both to be an easy ‘A.’ Unfortunately, my boredom reached a level where I quit reading the texts and was forced to compromise my integrity and just google the online test answers.  In the same semester, however, I enrolled in an acting class.  I am a reserved, introverted person and feared the course and expected it to be horribly difficult.  While it was easily the most challenging course for me, it resulted in some of my most favorite experiences.  I received C’s in the online courses and an A- in acting.     

In college, some of the required courses are unavoidably boring.  For these, you must find something to do while in them to hold your interest.  For papers, choose a topic that both fulfills the assignment and interests you beyond earning a grade.  For art projects, make something you want even if you don’t like the assignment parameters.  For me, my least favorite class was freshman composition.  While I love to read and write, the school’s curriculum required significant amounts of peer review and draft revisions which disagreed terribly with my process.  I dropped the class within the first month twice before finally sucking it up and resolving to finish.  Luckily, I realized that the writing prompts were easy enough to bend to suit my needs and I researched information I cared to know and bent it to suit the needs of the paper.  This allowed me to push past the frustration and boredom of reading terribly written student papers from my peers and making a handful of unnecessary revisions to each paper before being allowed to submit for grading.  If you make the effort to write a good paper, the instructor will forgive a loose interpretation of the prompt and so you should write about what you want to know.

College unavoidably will involve lots of hard work and boredom, but for some reason you are here.  Either dedicate yourself to doing well or quit.  Even if you hate it, trying hard in your classes rather than being dumb and lazy about them will make your time here go much faster.  Better, you may be surprised how easy it is to enjoy the experience and remember there are many worse places to be.