Based on Judith Howard’s article titled “Social Psychology of Identities”, constructing an identity means approaching and adapting social positions to your own life. Which basically states that when it comes to building your own identity one must take a look at their character, social positions, and roles. Within the exhibition I believe some of the people in the home movies where expected to be seen by others as many showed characteristics of organized calligraphy when recording. Many of the videos were made for some sort of entertainment or documentary to an audience. The question is, who is the audience for these films? I believe the audience for majority of these films would be family relatives, as they would understand the context behind the videos more clearly compared to outside people would question the film and heavily criticize it. For example, on the right wall on screen 28 it showed a home video of parents doing various things to their naked baby daughter whose name was Susan L. Palamara. Within the video the parents were holding their baby up from her legs, holding her in midair position from her legs. And the father rubbing his face towards his daughter’s vagina as a way to make her laugh. In the context of a family member watching this video, they would had viewed it as a comedy. However, from being viewed by strangers (which included myself) the video can be seen as disturbing due to the undressing of the baby girl all the way to what the parents did towards her which can be seen as extremely problematic. Another problematic part about this exhibition as a whole was the structuring of the left back side of the wall which had videos show casing African Americans, Indians, and some Chinese. Within this portion when some of the clips showed an African American on screen the video right next to it showed case a group of monkeys. This was problematic due to the racist phrases often told to African American people being called monkeys based on their skin tones and facial features which shows some racial discrimination. Alongside majority of the people being present are white and no Spanish demographics being shown. There was also a short instance of a man shown sexually harassing a distressed woman at a social gathering or party in which the woman made it obvious that she was uncomfortable but the man kept bothering her.
Some of these family home videos compare to artistic/commercial cinema in a few ways by first being unscripted works due to them being expected to stay in a private setting as well as be randomly recorded scenes that don’t easily transition from one video to another. However, because of that nature it heavily foreshadowed the social media imagery that many people hold today when it comes to presenting themselves towards a camera, based on the people trying to present a good side of them, a childhood event, or accomplishments in society or in your social circles. Which is something extremely common within our society in the present generation not only within American but around the world. Only major difference would be that in the modern time people have become more critical on what to post and how to make a post the best it can be through photo editing and right set ups.
What these images say about America in my opinion was that white people had more time and money to make these home videos compare to people of color as majority of the home videos presented white people than anything else. (which isn’t a bad thing but it was one of the most obvious observations.) As a graphic designer I didn’t learn much about these videos that I have learned in my film prior or by watching them, however I believe the museum chose these films for us to see in order to start a conversation about what we are seeing and comparing it to our own cultures and generation as a whole. With that in mind I also have a general idea on why the Museum also decided to call this exhibition “Private Lives, Public Spaces” which is that of us presenting our lives and the activities we do within our families or social circles to the general public and conversing on the differences/issues/similarities between them to ourselves. With that in itself starts building another form of identity due to the people observing and grouping together these films with each other’s experiences.
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