Kajal Madeka's Digital Portfolio

This photo essay is the personal story of my emotional journey through the conflicts and contradictions I faced with my established identity, as I traveled to a foreign land to live, learn, and work. It is a story told through the selection and arrangement of images, which led me to an exploration of the communicative potential of still visual media along with the use of digital technologies for obtaining the images and compiling the essay.

The process of creating this photo-essay to tell a personal story gave me greater insight into the power and limitations of still media and highlighted the importance of objectively distancing personal choices from the audience needs and the role of critical evaluation at each stage of the creative process to maintain focus and effectively convey the desired message.

An important lesson learnt in this creative process was that the message is constrained by the media used. Some messages are better conveyed through the use of sound, commentary and text. So in this case, it was essential to select a theme that was amenable to communication through images, finding the images to support the message and then arranging them in a way that logically develops the idea for the viewer.

The process of selection and elimination was the most time consuming and painful one. In choosing images that conveyed the vignettes of Indian life which I felt such strong attachment to, I had to constantly monitor myself by asking whether the image was central to the message I wanted to convey or will it throw the audience off in a different direction? Images were chosen not only on the subject of the picture but also the allegorical or literal story they told in their details, their visual impact and how well the images juxtaposed with each other on the slide. Thus, although a picture is worth a thousand words, those images that would entail an explanation or risk of misinterpretation were eliminated.

From the perspective of instructional technology, the entire process may be summarized as a weighing of materials, methods and message and is a prime example of the intersect of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge in practice. 

Exploring Still Media : Digital Photo-Essay