Perhaps two or three weeks ago Jessica, the Taiwanese Representative of the YonKaiChiimu, came to my room USB drive in hand in search of photos chronicling “American life.” After ensuring that there weren’t any pictures she could find that might get me arrested, I left her alone with my vast and bizarre array of digital camera photos that I’ve taken while traveling hither and yon in the past 3 or 4 years. When asked why she needed said photos she mumbled something about an exhibition or some other such nonsense. Frankly, I wasn’t really listening…
So you can imagine my surprise when a week ago people I ran into on campus started telling me that they really enjoyed my pictures, or alternately, that they had spotted me in “the exhibition.”
Soon thereafter I got the whole story (I listened this time) from Jessica… A month or so back a general notice had been sent out asking for pictures representative of life in whatever countries you might actually have pictures representative of life from… Jessica, for whatever reason, thought that it would be fun to submit some of my pictures in addition to some of hers.
To our extreme mutual surprise, in a photo exhibition that ultimately featured 90 pictures from countries all over the world, 6 of them were mine. I don’t know how many she actually submitted for consideration but my ending up with 6% of the spotlight seemed pretty hilarious to my friends as well as me.
Along what sort of criteria submissions were evaluated I have no idea, but as is obvious in at least one of the pictures below, artistic merit was not the critical and deciding factor…
Two points need to be stressed:
- I had absolutely no input or foreknowledge as to which of my pictures went in…
- Well over 1,000 students, faculty, staff, and campus visitors saw these during the one week exhibition period…
That being said, let’s begin!
No one is safe!