My initial approach to this project was selecting a few “isms” and attempting to find images based upon related keywords. For example, when searching for images defining “monopsychism”, which is the belief that individuals have a single eternal soul, I searched words like “eternal soul”, “death”, “body, soul, spirit”, and finally found the images I was looking for with “out of body experience”. I came to realize that finding images representing ideas was not as easy as it sounded. Eventually, I just started saving photographs that struck me, and I found “isms” to define the pictures I had already found. The process was quite lengthy, especially since you cannot simply Google a certain idea and find an “ism” that defines it. I had to scan the phrontistery website many times for the most fitting definition of my images and, regrettably, was not able to use some of my favorite photographs.
I feel that the most effective representations in my compilation are the images I used for “titanism”, “animism”, and “fatalism”. Titanism is the spirit of revolt or defiance against social conventions. I used the Tiananmen Square protests and the subsequent massacre to represent titanism, and I used two photographs on this slide for the sake of clarification. The first image is of the actual occurrence, and the second is a tribute, by Amnesty International, to the participants and victims of the 1989 protests. The first image defines the event, the second, represents the humanity behind it. I did not wish to show merely images violence and anger, but rather to reveal the motivation and emotion behind revolution.
Animism is the attribution of soul to inanimate objects. I invested quite a bit of energy into finding a true representation of this “ism”. Animism is not merely the personification of an object. Animism gives an object feeling and depth. I chose the wounded tree with a bloody bandage wrapped around it because the tree is depicted as a living, bleeding object that is quite capable of feeling pain.
Fatalism is the doctrine that events are fixed and humans are powerless to change or prevent them. This was also the most difficult “ism” for me to define, mainly because I had an idea of what I wanted in terms of imagery and there was no way to search for a photograph specifically tailored to my expectations. After sifting through countless pictures of natural disasters, I finally stumbled across this photo of a distraught young boy reaching out to the corpse of his younger brother, who had died as a result of a tsunami. The sorrow on this boy’s face, the strong hands that pull him back, and the nurse who shuts his brother’s casket all scream that death is final and we are helpless against its outcome. We cannot stop a hurricane in its path. We cannot reverse its course. We are at the mercy of nature. We are powerless against her will.
