WP1 Authors Note

The first thing I did when I was just starting with the rough draft of this paper was to come up with a thesis or direction to go with my paper. I looked back through the excersizes we had been doing for the past couple weeks and read through some of the ideas I had thrown out there already about my chosen photograph. I came down to having two possible rhetorical meaning for my photo which were highly contradictial to each other. One was that the author was making a statement about how the new elements and old emelents in Barcelona come together as one, and the other was that the author felt that commerialism was starting to overshadow parts of the city's history and culture. I ended up choosing to work with the second idea, mostly because it was the viewpoint that I figured less people could come up with themselves from the photo so I figured it would be much more fun to work with.
As far as the content of the paper itself goes, I really wanted to focus on the lighing and contrast within the photograph. Anytime you have a black and white photo, the contrast and balance of light and dark shades always plays a key role in conveying the photos meaning. My strategy was to break the photograph down into several smaller elements, analyze each of them individually, then relate them all back together to the photo as a whole.
As far as my revisions go, the first thing I did was added a meaningful conclusion which acted to tie all of the ideas throughout my paper together at the end. This included a "So What" statement as well as restating my thesis in a different way. I next added a couple photographs of parts of barcelona in which I fealt expressed some of the cities history or culture because in my paper, I am arguing that culture is being overshadowed. I slightly rephraised my origional thesis to be alittle less explicit and leave alitlle more room for interpretation on the part of the audience. On my final revision, I added alittle analysis in the conclusion of another photograph of the same area in barcelona. I fealt this helped to offer an additional perspective and also really helped build on the context of the Barcelona Nights photograph itself. I then mostly focussed on finding some additional facts about the history of Barcelona because if I was going to argue that the history was being overshadowed, it made sence to tell alittle about what that history was. I choose to incorporate most of this research near the beginning of my paper so the audience would be able to use it to build on the context behind the photo. Lastly, when analyzing the photograph one final time, I found a fw more, smaller elements, such as the lighting of the windows, which I decided also held some importance to the photos meaning so I chose to also incorporate alittle bit about that into my paper. Overall, I really enjoyed this project in comparison with writing projects I had done in the past, mostly because it left us so much room with self expression and developing our own ideas. We had some say in what we were writing about which definatly made the project more fun.