Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Six Hundred Minutes

         Historically, culturally, and traditionally the yearbook has come to be the showcase for who we are as we develop through our school years. Every page of a yearbook contains a memory-- more often than not a memory that is not your own, or that now eludes you.  I was intrigued at the importance of memory as self-identity, and through the exploration of my past yearbooks began to find that who we are stems from what we do; I am the person I am today because of all my memories that stem from my activities throughout my life. I have never enjoyed being placed into a box as a “theatre kid”, yet the pages of my yearbooks place a spotlight on only that aspect of my identity. I wanted a forum to explore the duality of interests and the duality of identity. I decided to present memories as self-identity through not only myself, but also through my two close friends Kevin Scarlett and Morgan Williams. The three of us are theatre majors here at Rollins, but we also have other interests, memories, and identities that have no relation to the stage.
        I selected the 2004 Tomokan (the last yearbook published for Rollins) to be the casing for my project. I enjoyed the collective memory that surrounds a yearbook, and thought the pre-printed pages of a class past would render more familiarity between the identities my friends and I ascribe to ourselves, to those of alum past. I then heightened the interactive nature of the yearbook by including pieces of script, academia, or sheet music as they applied to the memory and identity of the subject of focus on the page. 
       I selected the method of tape transfer to be my main method for presenting the photograph because I thought it visually depicted the flow of memory and the images that can be evoked, it also allowed for the images to be apart of the pages rather than sit atop them. The tape method was particularly effective where other types of memory were addressed on the page, as in: Kevin’s swimming page, where the sense memory of chlorine and water evoked the feeling of being underwater, as well as the muscle memory of swimming and diving; and in Morgan’s sorority page, wherein she recollects the many events that occurred associated with Mayflower Hall and the collective memory of sisters before her. In all of the aforementioned examples, memory played a significant part of the facet of the individual depicted; and also allowed for the recognition of identity through occurrences or images.