Both my Final Film Essay and my time spent in my photography class taught me to be highly critical of my own work. I saw the world through my viewfinder and developed a set of skills necessary to capture the new environment I in which I found myself.

            My clear love for architecture imbued itself throughout my photography and allowed me the opportunity to combine my interests in film, culture, and design. As such, this series of photographs tell the story of my time spent abroad; they show my changed worldview as I physically encountered a new culture rather than viewing it through a screen. Through a concentration on form as a series of figures and planes and columns, they demonstrate my careful treatment of architecture as a series of moments and details.

            My Final Film Essay was my preliminary assessment of how film can represent both culture and architecture, and how those representations can influence the thoughts of an entire generation. I took my previous writings and used them as evidence to support my insights into what filmmakers found to be most important and how they achieved it. It was about my understanding of a subject from afar. My photography series were the physical manifestation of that understanding, but rather than a passive viewer, I was an active participant in the activities occurring around me in Rome. They are a record of my time spent experiencing a new culture through first hand experiences rather than secondary media.

            My Final Film Essay is purely theoretical in its statement of culture through film. With no first hand experience to accompany each movie, there was no real comparison or understanding to have between fiction and reality. Contrastingly, however, as they are my personal photographs, my pictures taken in Rome are a firsthand interpretation of a new culture and its architecture. They tell my personal account of my time spent abroad, and demonstrate my interest in foreign culture and design. Each artifact however is clearly about viewing and understanding architecture in a new way; one is viewing through another’s eyes, and the other is through my own.

            As I reflect upon these two separate artifacts, it is clear that my Final Film Essay was a precursor to my Rome Diptych Series. The essay was the research and curiosity phase, and the photos represent the analysis and exploration phase. My photos were my interpolation of what I learned in film on how to capture architecture and culture and translate it into two-dimensional media, which is then perceived by a wider audience than myself.

            Both my Final Film Essay and my Rome Photo Series, through their similarities and differences, have taught me to see and appreciate the world differently and have deepened my understanding of architecture at an international scale. While films do innately bias viewers, they can still allow viewers a glimpse into the lives of others. That glimpse inspired me to seek opportunities to study abroad so I might gain my own perspective on the lives of others. To experience the world both mentally and physically, through film and reality, was a fantastic experience and inspired my collection of artifacts.