Now thats an important photo...

When I started this assignment I approached it from a rather conservative point of view. I like most people started going through my family photos and thought about who these people really are. After all when we look at a picture of our favorite uncle and all we see is the uncle that took us to football games and the boat show. We don't see the person who was an alcoholic wife beater and tax cheat. We make up our own realities about the people in our lives.
The people in the photos are not my friends or family, they are all well known recognizable public figures. Who they really are is up for debate though. What would the people in their lives say about them? Would their memories of these people match our expectations? When they think about them do they envision the great physicist or due they remember the person that was so emotionally distant that he would go days or even weeks without speaking to his own wife who lived under the same roof. The great artist or the substance abuser.
Who is to say who the real person is? We are all a thousand different people at different times. I begin to wonder how the people in our see us. In the backs of peoples minds do they see the artist or the abuser? How the world sees us is too often given to great of an importance. It allows the guilty “charmer” to go unpunished and the innocent “schlep” to suffer the undeserved judgments handed down by the self righteous.
If we as a society would spend more time looking at the the objective realities of the world around us we would always reward the and chastise deserving. Instead of perpetuating the stereotypes and prejudices of our fathers.
Try to think about this tomorrow morning when that one particularly difficult student starts up again.