Creativity- (Photography as an art form)
Service- (Raised awareness on issues of global significance)
Photography is an art form that helps the artist express their inner world and their feelings. My dad is a huge inspiration for my passion for photography and I have been clicking photos since 3 years now. I am a self taught photographer, I have mostly learned from online tutorials and practice. During the quarantine I explored a lot of kinds of photography. One of them was self- portraits and so I challenged myself to click 20 self portraits on 20 different issues. Thus this CAS experience not only gave me the opportunity to speak on important issues but also allowed me to brush up my photography and editing skills.
LO-1-Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth.
Photography actually helps us to depict our inner feelings. I clicked more than 20 self portraits and constantly kept posting them on social media as a means to spread awareness on the issues. The appreciation received by the audience helped me boost my morale and I look forward to grooming myself in this field. It also helped me understand that I am not that confident about my body, it helped me identify that I have body insecurities. However as I kept on taking more self portraits, I started accepting myself more and more.
LO-2-Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
The most challenging part was clicking photos, I would pose in front of the camera but there would be no one to capture the composition. To overcome this issue I tried to explore different features of my camera and found out that I could click photos using bluetooth. Secondly I didn’t have proper equipment such as a tripod and so it was hard to find a proper place to set up the camera. However, to overcome this issue I used books and other boxes to make a tripod.
During the entire process, from thinking about a concept to editing and posting I identified challenges and obstacles and thought of solutions to last-minute problems.
LO-4-Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
As an IB student there’s always a lot on our plate, in the start it was hard to prioritize the task with all the submissions and assessments. However I am a person who is usually very organised and so with time I set up a goal to shoot a new photo every alternate day. Which gave me one day to plan the concept and allowed me to shoot on the next day. I continued this for 3 months .The quarantine surely made this easy as there would be a lot of time after school hours to do this task. During these 3 months I discovered my love for photography, especially self-portraits as they gave me the ability to express sooo much.
LO-6-Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance
I worked on 20 different issues, to list a few… issues like
- Beauty standards
- Depression
- No planet B(preserving this planet)
- Normalization of rape culture
- Menstruation
These are some societal issues that we all are aware of but aren’t taken seriously. Social media has made people so conscious about their body as everyone tries to abide by the Beauty standards and we are aware that this is happening but no one is talking about it’s harmful consequences.
The noramlisation of Rape culutre is a another issue that no one speaks about, but everyone hears news about how every single day the number of rape cases are incresing, not gradually but at a very fast rate. Thus it pushed me to speak about it!
It was quite interesting to be working on different issues as well as enjoying what I really like to do! This really pushed me to create more and more, and till date I have clicked 40 self portraits which is double than my goal for this experience.
LO-7-Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
The actions undertaken by me were completely ethical and, on the contrary, something which I feel should be implemented by everyone. All my ideas were original and purely mine. However I did take some help when it came to the write up of the particular photograph and so I have mentioned and given credits accordingly to avoid plagiarism.
To conclude, this CAS experience helped me to brush up my skills and trained me to be more independent as I had to everything on my own without any assistance. ‘Knowledgeable’ and ‘Principled’ were the primary learner profile attributes which were present throughout the process. Most importantly this didn’t feel like something I had to DO, but rather something that really made me happy. Even though I am done with 20 portraits I have continued to click more, create more and more content!
