Post 3

Women selling Tamales
Alexander Silva

My final project is a black and white photography zine inspired about immigrants and their portrayals in the media and how they view America. I planned on making a full size zine for every person in class but I found it really expensive to order them and so I will only make one printed out zine and the rest will be handmade zine from copy paper. I also plan on making it black and white because I feel like if I add color it would distract the eyes from the subject, also it is much cheaper to print in black and white. Going through the process of taking photographs was something I enjoyed but also something I had a hard time with because my topic is very sensitive. My topic deals with immigrants and thus making it a personal project, I felt like I was stepping on very thin ice because this topic is very controversial with many different views. I was supposed to have portraits of immigrants but I found it very difficult to have people pose for me mostly because of their fear which is very understanding. Instead of having portraits of people, I took photos behind them and I always asked permission first. I also wanted to include pictures that had some sort of meaning to an immigrant, I decided to include them because to a regular U.S citizen a building might mean nothing, but to an immigrant, that same building will mean the whole world to them. I aimed in trying to get the reader in the same shoes as an immigrant without trying to force them into a narrative. I didn’t want to focus on a specific ethnicity or on a specific person because I didn’t want there to be a stereotype.

Zero Tolerance
John Moore

 Throughout the research of my project, I didn’t really find people who were influential in my execution of the zine. I did try to search up artists that had a similar idea of what I had in mind but I would come up short, I mostly stuck to photographers. I’ve been seeing John Moore’s photography and I’ve been able to derive some inspiration from him but mostly I didn’t want to look at too many photographers because I was afraid that my work would subconsciously start to look like theirs. I did look through Instagram for inspiration for my work and I found some interesting accounts that I now follow and hashtags I would look through. My work isn’t so much as to fight for a better immigration policy, although that would be amazing, but my work is mostly to shed light on people who don’t have a voice.