A Business Woman's Meaning of Life

The understanding of life is subjective based on a person's history, philosophy, mental process and many others factors in life. To understand a person's meaning and visualize it through photography is what my class Journalism taught over the past few weeks. My classmates and I learned about subjectivity and objectivity,  how photos affected the world around us, and grammar to prepare us for college. We also attended the Chicago Ideas Week for a talk on Journalism and the current political atmosphere. In this unit, Image, we had to interview someone who was willing to tell us their meaning of life and take a photo afterwards. I had interview Dolly Zea, a saleswoman and a business adviser at several different companies. I am proud of interview I did as it contained nuanced information and I was stressed on the original time limit the project was originally due.

It was close to the middle of the night, and we were both tired in a car. My mother and I both came from a long day with little sleep from the night before. I saw her, looking out the window to the road ahead as I planned to interview her about her meaning of life. She already knew I was going to ask her questions for a school assignment, and she persisted for me to bring them up. We were stopped by a train and waited for it to pass by. After thirty minutes, I decided to conduct the interview.

With hesitation, I asked her in Spanish about the meaning of life? After interpreting and finally understanding my broken accent, she took a silent moment and began to talk in her language:

“What is my meaning of life? My meaning of life is my family, my kids. My meaning of life is to help others in need. It is to create a proposal. To have a proposal to wake up every day. A proposal to be a better person, a better mother, a better wife. To be a better companion, to be a better daughter. To be a better boss. To try to do things-every time better. To live life simple and to enjoy every moment of life well.”

JN, "Mother Sitting" web, 2019

The most interesting word to was “proposal”, and she used it throughout the conversation. I enjoyed that it was phrased where it wasn’t fact but a hope for something better. It showed a level of uncertainty that, when we were all younger, we never thought of. To understand the word better, I asked if she thought about her meaning and if her proposals are conscious or if the word “proposal” was built to deep into her that she didn’t need to think.:

“I always think about it. Every decision I take. The consciousness is to think about what to do and the consequences of what happens. That is the consciousness. It doesn’t matter if I do good or bad. My consciousness will state that the action will have an impact.”

The thought I had was how the intent of an action was secondary to the implication based around her comment. It wasn’t for a while until I understood why this comment upsets me because, as an artist, meaning is the strongest part of a piece. So taking out the meaning of an art piece would only take away the implications it brings from said meaning. Therefore, there is no action created by the artpiece, and it is rendered useless.

Throughout the interview, there were words I didn’t understand. There was one word, “madurez”, that piqued my interest, and I hadn’t heard of it when she first said it. I asked her what it meant and she said, “It is to see error in your life and to fix them every time. All the errors, I learned not to commit them.” I was intrigued, but still confused. So I asked if she knew an example. “Yes. Before I thought, for example, when I was young, I didn’t believe I was going to die. Now, I enjoy every moment of life because many people, at the conner, because of their age, are dying.”

An hour after the interview, I learned the word ”madurez” was “maturity” and that when I realize the core of her meaning. The ability to reflect whenever possible. The ability to reflect on a decision and factor in how certain elements lead to certain scenarios. To realize your time and how to spend it with others. For the final question of my interview, I asked my mother how she would imagine her meaning as an image.

“I would be in thought. I would be in thought because I’m a creative person. I’m always thinking. I would be with my family. I’m in a beach with you three.”

My shutter speed, which measures the motion of the frame, was at 60 frames per second for the focus. The aperture, which measures the light on the lense, is at 3.4 since I wanted to show natural daylight. For the rule of thirds, the main focus was my mother since she alines directly on the left side of the frame on the graph (of the rule of thirds). She also has two rays of light (the kitchen and sun) over her while most objects of the frame only have one source of lighting.

After finishing my breakfast the next morning, I saw my mother working a notebook with concerned thought. I opened the curtains (she noticed) and I warned her about me taking a picture. She ignored me and looked down on her notebook silently.

The picture has more subjectivity than objectivity. It shows my mother not only in focus, but in reflection as she stares to a blank piece of paper. Yet, in the background, she thinks about her family based by the treehouse. People could interpret my mother as either planning to write something down or having nothing to say. Either way, both interpretations include the treehouse, which also mean child-related/ideas of past in the background while she is working now.

I knew how the words “proposal” and “consciousness” worked in her mind without her stating them. She was always working since childhood. At times, I would also use the “proposal” method when I’m dealt with uncertainty. But what I found surprising was how she thought of her mortality. As a child, I resemble my mother mentally compared to other siblings. Yet, even when I was young I knew death was inevitable.. I hadn’t heard much from my mother’s childhood besides that she was hardworking and I have only seen passive people of my age deny their mortality. To see that contradiction makes me who if her original description was just hiding all the errors.