"Judith Howard Assignment "

Yoshi Stover

2/21/20




"Judith Howard Assignment "

Home movies are a great window into the identity of people. Judith Howard describes identity as, “the need for a sense of who one is, together with an often overwhelming pace of change in surrounding social contexts...” In the MoMA, there was an art exhibition of home movies by various artists. All of them capturing different things different people were doing at various times.

Through Judith Howard’s lenses on identity I see that people seem to identify different parts of themselves in various ways. This is what Judith Howard calls, “Interactionism.” Judith Howard explains that, “the basic premise of symbolic interaction is that people attach symbolic meaning to objects, behaviors, themselves, and other people, and they develop and transmit these meanings through interaction.” For an example there was one movie where there were a few African american children, and a white lady dancing in front of the Statue of liberty. To me, these people are dancing in joy of the freedom that they are able to enjoy. The statue of liberty is the symbol of freedom, and the children dancing is their way of interacting with it.

An identity is a social construct. It’s something that people will have to create themselves and learn more about. We will symbolic things that we are able to relate to. Things like flags or symbols are what gives meaning to people’s identity. By surrounding ourselves with these symbolic objects and meanings we are able to start crafting an identity out of it, and start connecting ourselves to groups. Like if a person is gay, they’ll be able to connect themselves to the LGBTQ group and find that it has become a part of their identity.

People in the home movies most likely doubted that they would be judged or seen a certain way by others. After all home movies are generally not meant for the public eyes, hence the ‘Private lives’ part of the exhibition title. I would imagine most of these people would’ve never imagined having the video being some part of a large exhibition especially at a big name gallery like the MoMA. On the other hand if the person was recording doing something illegal or bad, I would imagine that they think they’re most likely going to be judged for what they’ve done.

This isn’t like an artistic film or commercial cinema film, where the actors are expected to be judged or seen a certain way by an audience. In a cinematic film, the audience generally labels characters in the movie, like villain or hero.

As for the audience of home movies, they’re most likely meant for most likely themselves, and some close relatives and friends. Home movies are made more so to properly remember the memory of something, like a wedding. It was never particularly meant for being shown publicly like this.

The reason why the museum calls this Exhibit, “Private Lives, Public Spaces,” is because many of these home videos present how little we see of people despite them being in a public space. Even though people can be in a public space, for example, a supermarket, we don’t pay attention to them. Thus they’re sort of living a private life despite being in a public space.

A lot of these videos foreshadow modern social media. For an example a lot of these videos are snippets of people’s lives. A lot of the time smaller social media accounts send videos of the account owner doing random things to show friends what they’re up to. This is what these old home movies feel like. On the other hand, current social media is different because there are accounts that are specifically for things like, Life hacks or tutorial videos, politics, comedy, and celebrity videos.