Do It - Calli Sumsion

 

Original Instructions:

 Pg. 159 FELDMANN, Hans-Peter

Homework (or Do It Yourself) (1996)

 

Look for a photo of a person who seems likeable or attractive. It’s important that you can assume this person is dead. You don’t need proof, your assumption is enough. The photograph might be found a variety of places: magazines, flea-markets, a family photo album. In any case, you must take great care in the search, which will continue until your intuition tells you that you’ve found the right photo. However, it is important that you pick a complete stranger.

You take this photo and choose a frame according to your taste, as with any home decoration. This can be a wall frame or a standing frame, or possibly a case that you carry around.

Having brought this photo into your daily life, and now looking at it frequently, you should, as often as you like, think about who this person might have been like, about the cause of his or her death. You should find out how close you can get to this person, and at what point you would him or her a name…

 

The image I used:

What Happened as well as Impressions and Thoughts:

•        At first, I thought it would be easy to find a person because it said to follow my intuition, but it was hard convincing myself that a photo of someone met the requirements of being likeable or attractive, a stranger, and dead.
•        I chose the elderly man on the very right of this Alumni Insurance Program ad in a BYU magazine. I assumed that he was a very likeable because of this family photo and I’m assuming it is wife on the very left.
•        I stuck this photo with everything else I do on my corkboard in my room back at home. It literally took a few seconds until I decided that his name was John, graduated from BYU, and was a surgeon. But I never got further than that because I could not really connect with this stranger.
•        I have many photos in my room that spark joy (mostly art prints and polaroid pics.) I display these photos because I know these people and can relate to memories that happened with them, compared to a person that I have to make up their life.