This assignment is the final take-home exam that I give to students at the end of the semester. It incorporates all of the ideas that we’ve talked about during the semester related directly to Seeing & Writing 2. Here, students are asked to pull together the photos that they have taken over the course of the semester into a final photo album with an accompanying essay that reflects on how their ideas of “seeing and writing� have evolved and changed over the semester. Final Take-Home Photograph Album Exam At the beginning of the semester, you were asked to find a 35mm camera (disposable or one you already owned) and to start taking pictures of people, places, events, holidays, images, anything you found particularly interesting. This assignment was made with the idea that it would be turned into your final project, and thus your final exam, for this course. The time has come for you to develop your film and to start the process of choosing the pictures that you believe are most representative of those things we have talked about this semester: Looking Beyond the Ordinary; Reality vs. Make-Believe; and American Icons. I realize that your pictures won’t all necessarily deal with these ideas specifically; however, I do expect to see that you’ve moved beyond the concept of taking 25 pictures of your friends at a party to finding more substance in what you do photograph. For your final exam, you should choose at least 25 pictures to put together in a photo album. This album will be a reflection of you as a photographer, what you see, how you observe, and how you fit yourself into your many communities and society as a whole. A quote at the beginning of our textbook by Henry David Thoreau may help you think beyond the ordinary when reviewing and choosing your photos: No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? And Susan Sontag, in her essay “On Photography� claims that “the act of photography is more than passive observing� (294). In which photographs are you more than a passive observer? After choosing your photographs, you should put them together in some sort of bound form and provide each photo with a label. Keep in mind that your audience wasn’t there when you took the picture. At the end of the album, you should write an essay (2-3 pages, double-spaced) that provides a more thorough commentary of your overall album. Please consider the following in your essay:

1. What process did you use to choose the photos you did? In other words, what made you choose certain photographs to include? Don’t just say things like the other shots were blurry.
2. How are the photos representative of you and your place in this world?
3. What can the audience expect to see (what meaning are we getting) from looking at your photos?
4. Which photos are your favorites and why?
5. Describe yourself as a photographer at the beginning of the semester and now.
6. What does looking beyond the ordinary mean to you?
7. Are you “a reader, a student merely, or a seer?� Are you more than a “passive observer?�
8. How do you view relationship between taking pictures and writing? Is there one? What are the similarities between the two? The differences?
9. Has the picture taking process over the course of the semester ultimately made you a better writer? How?
10. What have you learned from this process that you can incorporate into other courses you take, adventures you make, or actions you take? In other words, how has taking pictures and writing altered your ways of critically thinking and observing?

Of course, you do not have to limit yourself to the questions above. Please feel free to explore the ideas in and behind your photographs.