Every Rose Has Its Thorns

In Freshman year, I went to a seminar that changed my outlook on societal ranks. The orator started off by mentioning that humans are always taught to single out those who don't belong. How was this even relevant to the theme of the presentation, racism? But then I began to ponder on his words and I realized that he was right; this habit is inborn in us, and activated as early as the first grade, when teachers tell students to cross out items that are irrelevant to a set of objects. Soon enough this "crossing out" becomes shunning from society. 

Such as the rose in The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The rose bush itself appears in the book sparsely, but the symbol is omnipresent. When first introduced, it is situated amongst the most dreary place in a city; across from the jail and in the peripheral of a cemetery. The rose seems as an irony of sorts; where something of pulchritude sits in a place where life seems to come to a stop, figuratively for a jailer and literally for a corpse, and serves as a beacon of hope for those who are bound to be shunned from the world. 

More importantly, the rose is a symbol for the book's main character, Hester Prynne, the object of society's distaste. She is the embodiment of a rose itself. Her "rose", or beauty, is clearly etched onto her appearance. However, although she is portrayed as having "indescribable grace" (Hawthorne 51), she is plastered with a surefire sign of ignominy, a large scarlet "A" to represent her Adultery. The adultery itself represents the thorns on a rose.

The photo below shows Hester's beauty in the form of a rose, surrounded by all its thorns. 


On a rose, thorns exist to protect the rose from harm. This feature evolved due to the constant interruption of its growth by pressure and threats from the outside world. Now when anyone picks a rose, the first thing they notice is the presence of thorns. 

Just in the same way, everyone in the Scarlet Letter notices Hester's "A" before her innocent appearance. 

But all the Puritans are hypocrites. 

What the seminar eventually taught me was that all people have thorns. Meaning, all people have their flaws. So we shouldn't be singling out others at all, because if we continued the same process until the end, we would all exist separately in our own little world of individual flaws. 

Solitude: Finding Passions and Escaping Struggles

I think the best definition for solitude would be a human's desire for a removal from society to either redefine themselves away from stereotypes or to seek improvement in personal goals or talents. 

Stereotypes and prejudice infiltrate our very lives. Perhaps you have heard some of the common ones and are unaware of them: Asians are smart, Latino girls are looking for a good time, Native Americans are alcoholics, Black men are criminals, and the list goes on. And these wrongful perceptions of people hurt the victims to the point where they want to feel a disconnect from society itself. 

Thankfully, solitude doesn't always turn out bad. Some of the best artistic endeavors and masterpieces come from solitude. 

When people retreat into seclusion, they search for hobbies that will help them relieve the anger they feel while being discriminated against. And out of this anger, comes a beautiful representation of what people believe capture their feelings. 

Like me, Uldus Bakhtiozina (in the video below) uses photography as a means to find some relief, but she goes a step farther in making sure that her photos undermine the stereotypes against her. 

The Truth and Untruths about Photography

If one were to write a great novel such as, The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, and be able to establish a sense of verisimilitude, who is to say that they cannot achieve the same appearance of truth in a simple photo?  

Thousands of photographers capture images every day, but only a few are able to capture the truth. Out of a thousand photos taken, give or take a few, only a meager amount can expose the uncomfortable embarrassments of society. 

Few have been successful at such a tedious feat. Those who have succeeded do not flaunt, for what they have discovered is not something commendable about the world. The photos they have taken do not just uncover society's cryptic secrets, they delve into the lives of those who are burdened with the ills of life. 

In America, many faults are yet to be found, but those that have prove to be shocking. Julius Krausz snapped the photo below in the 1900's, showing that although this era may have been fruitful and luxurious at times, all was not well in any area other than the 1st percentile of the population. What much literature struggles to write about, Krausz manages to ensnare in one breathtakingly terrifying shot. 

In addition to taking the photo itself, the artist must face an arduous journey to both overcome their own boundaries as well as those set by authorities. In such repressive countries, capturing a photo that reveals an injustice gets them jailed, or killed. In the most recent news, Azerbaijan's photographers fight against threats to find out that many citizens are being kept quiet on their judgement against an upcoming election in the country. 

(To find out more information check out this article! http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2013/10/from-the-magazine-azerbaijan/)

However, although the photo of American children huddled together in an abandoned street shows undeniable truth about the poverty of the 1900's, there is also something polemical about taking a photo. 

Photos can also be quite deceiving. In reality, the photo above may look quite disturbing, but the actual truth could be something quite different. I, as well as many others, have come to discover that all truths are based on a type of fiction and all fiction is based on some sort of truth. Sound paradoxical? It is. The fiction itself varies in both situations, where the former refers to perspectives and the latter refers to a figment of imagination. 

As a pioneer of modern photography, Alfred Stieglitz once said, "“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”

Take the life of a normal photographer, per say. In his memoir, Voices In The Mirror, Gordon Sparks talks about his encounter with his first job in Washington D.C , through which he learnt that " a good documentary photographer's work has as much to do with his heart as it does with the eye" (Sparks 106). 

So in the end, a truth uncovering a country's sins may be captured but almost all of it is based on the perspective of the photographer, or that "of the beholder".