This project reflected on the nature of relationships as over the course of a life, they only seem to grow more and more complicated as outside sources such as friends, work, a family, and other’s expectations pileup. To me, relationships are the connection between two people and the weight of their shared worlds between them. It means that no matter what you’ve done or where you are, you have someone out there thinking of you always. Love is, of course, always an important factor in a relationship, but sometimes peoples’ misconceptions of what love is cloud their expectations of what are relationship should be. Not everyone is able to find that kind of relationship in their life, but when those who are need to know how precious what they have is.
In my reduction, I took a couple backwards in time through their wedding, to their first “real date” at prom, to time at the very beginning of their relationship just standing in a field, alone, but together. As they move backwards in time, the amount of “stuff” necessary to show where they are together lessens. In the first image, they are at their most formal, preparing to make the final walk that will tie them together for the rest of their lives. This is the point of no return for either of them because in society, to renounce this claim of one another is a mark of shame. In the second, they are at the entrance of their senior prom. He’s bought her a bouquet which now dangles from his hand and she looks around nervously. To “come out” to society at an event such as this is to “go steady”. In the final picture, they are simply standing together in a field. There is no one looking on, no societal role they have to fill. By taking away almost everything that would govern what they might decide to do, I gave them the most freedom they would ever have.
Eventually I learned that to me, relationships equal a lack of freedom and that perhaps I was the one who was looking at things the wrong way. The dalliance of the final picture is what appeals to me the most, but it is also what disappears as relationships progress. Once people and societal roles began getting involved with my picture, I realized I began to use less color and less, well, happiness, shown through. As a whole, this picture showed to me that in my point of view, it isn’t what everyone else things of people being together, but what they feel for each other that is important. One doesn’t need church buildings or the acceptance of peers to be happy. They just need each other.
