For your third short project, develop a visual/photographic essay which reflects on your experience with the camera in your neighborhood and the subsequent photographic results. As you develop your reflection, include insights and connections to the Sontag text. How you focus your response is really up to you as a writer/thinker. You must, however, integrate and analyze key quotes/claims from the Sontag text while reflecting on your experience and particular photographs you took, as “evidence” for the ideas you are adding to the intellectual conversation started by Sontag.

Don’t forget to cite your quotations or paraphrases of Sontag in MLA format. Likewise, be sure to practice the “citation sandwich” move to craft the essential lead-ins and lead-outs needed to help readers navigate the pieces of Sontag’s text you are bringing in to think further about.

The Details

You’ll want to make this response a “photographic essay” by including one or two of the photographs that you took. Be sure to discuss them directly in your response. Embed them into your document as well.

If you want some specific direction here, you can use one of the following prompts to help focus your response:

What was the experience like photographing around your neighborhood (an act which may rarely take place in that context)? Did the act of photography, in the realm of an every day location, become an “experience” or a way of seeing certain things you’ve never (or might never have) noticed? How does this connect with Sontag’s claims?

Consider how your selection, or framing, of certain images changed the context of what you were looking at? Were you able to capture something unique? Through your photos, did you “interpret” the neighborhood in a certain way? What are the implications of this in connection with Sontag’s thinking?

How did being behind the camera make you conscious of the “aggression” or “appropriation” which Sontag discusses? How do these claims of Sontag’s work in today’s cultural context where the proliferation of the camera is even more widespread and commonly used? (Did anyone react to you taking pictures? Do you think you portrayed your neighborhood accurately?)
Previous Student Samples for Short Essay Response 3: