Visual Autodocumentary and Illustrated Autobiography, Theory and Practice, Self Representation in Home Pages - Miles Hochstein Documented Life An Autodocumentary Miles Hochstein The Visual Representation of Human Lives How would you tell your life story and illustrate your life experiences? Welcome to my big old list of online autobiography and autodocumentary. This page is a guide to, and commentary on, autodocumentaries, visual autobiographies, illustrated autobiographies, and other acts of visual self representation and visual life story telling being committed daily around the web. You can read my evaluation criteria below, but don't be limited by my views on what's good and what's better. People who make the effort to represent themselves in visual and photographic terms on the web have my respect and thanks for their artistic and documentary acts. If you know of a site that does a good job of describing a life (yours or someone else's) in visual terms (including multiple pictures across time) please let me know about it. Visual Autodocumentary - Featured Visual Representations of Lives Lifelong Autodocumentaries Daily Journals Tom Michalik Michelle Paramjit Oberoi Jonathan's Daily Photo Project Betsy Byars Suzy and Diego Goldberg, Argentina Diana J. Limjoco Pollard The Twins Index Rajnair fliarubinstein John D. 'Bud' Banks Noah K. Everyday Wesley H. Clark Zilpha Keatley Snyder Stew Ellington One a Day Project Scott Pearce Douglas G. Mack K.C. Kern 9:09 David C. Hill Michael McCafferty Brian Walter Daily Jason Gerry Manacsa Toby Philpott Jeffery Knaggs Daily Marqs Justin Allyn Hall Donald Mark Dr. Leon Lederman Stephan H. Schuman Peter C. Hocking Sydne Allan G. MacDiarmid Peter Marquis-Kyle bascha Myron Turner billeadie My Life Story by Mary Butler My Life Story by Cyrilla Williams Ames Lewis Everson: 1873-1945 James M. Deem Paul Guinan David Denenberg Difficult to Clasify Randy Littlejohn Russel Sipe Kirk Israel Tomoko Sawada Megan Arietta Smith Brian Dana Akers Rosie McGee Carla Williams Derek Bishop Paul Winter Marchoul Irving "Itchy" Bronsky Chris Thompson A New York Sam Paul Victor Rick Hines Glenn Deal McMurry Time Limited Journals Duane & Eva Bristow Richard (Rick) deGaris Doble Sharbat Gula, of Afghanistan Andy Walker George Robert Bodnar A. H. Tobiassen Tow - A year in 60 seconds David Lynch Khejok Rinpoche Stephen Lovat Matt Brewbaker kc2jpo Kevin Kane It is January 2007. I no longer maintain this list, but it continues to be visited frequently. In April of 2006 I last culled some of the dead links and left the autodocumentaries and illustrated autobiographies that were then still available on the web. Some are really great, some aren't. You'll have to decide what's worth your time. I find everything here interesting in one way or another. Send me your illustrated life story web address and I will happily post it here. All lives are equal, but some of the better told visual stories are listed above nearer the top. That's an editorial judgment on my part, and there is no shortage of well told visual stories among those further below too. It's really not a ranking system, and there's good stuff scattered throughout, all the way down to the bottom. I also added another kind of autodocumentary - Daily Photo Journals. Distinguishing characteristics? Photo Journals seem to begin in the age of digital photography (still young) and childhood is often missing. Where they go, and for how long, remains an open question. As with all categories, the boundaries are debatable. out of range These are illustrated not exactly autobiographies kinda sorta. I don't know what they are, except interesting. They don't fit the model but they are worth noting. Anna Edwards Mateo Carol Lay Mikahil Yeselson Life as a History of Injuries Rachel's Life on a Dairy Farm Postcards: A life story in pictures What a Life: An Autobiography (Dadaist) still other visual obsessions I've been following various other visual obsessions around the web, and even though they have little to do with autodocumentary, I've decided to keep a list here. Enjoy. The California Coastline 3000 Miles Across America Washington State Coastline McClintock'sDocumented House The Shower Project Doors I Touched Eat 22 Illustrated Biographies Yes, They Are Illustrated, But No, They Are Not Autobiographies or Author Not Subject - Subject Not Author The following are illustrated biographies, often published as online obituaries. Their subjects are not their authors in any meaningful sense that I can detect, but I sometimes save them and post them here. They are a different kind of visual life story telling. In some cases they appear to be vanity biographies assembled by the staffs of rich or famous men. How would the visual representation of your life be different if it was someone else, not you, who assembled your story from your photo albums and old ID cards tucked away in envelopes in your desk? Stephen Wolfram Michael Jackson The Brown Sisters Four, Nicholas Nixon Portrait of Louise Anna Kubelka Dav Pilkey, author of Captain Underpants" Ruth Orkin Alger Hiss Charles Smith Velma Lucille Bernal Mendoza John Ball Emma Goldman Michael Milken Al Gore, Jr. Non-illustrated Autobiographies Yes, They Are Autobiographies, But No, They Are Not Very Illustrated Some of these non-ilustrated autobiographies do have pictures, but for some reason I have decided that they don't really "qualify" as "illustrated". Maybe they use pictures, but the pictures aren't the way the story is told, or something like that. If you disagree, let me know and I can adjust. I've moved these down the page because they are farthest from my interest in the visual portrayal of the changing human form. Kenneth Allen Freeman Earl Como (1919-1996) Jim Greenblat Allan Cole Freeman Berl Locker Virginia Bradford (1900-1996) Florence (Moore) Wilbur Lady Donna Cleugh Nikolai Telsa (yes, that Telsa) Joseph Benjamin Jewkes Edith Hildegard Andersson, 1891-1986 William Edwards Smith Comer A. Donnel Autodocumentary Theory and Autobiography Theory (Contributions to this list are always appreciated!) Bill Andrews - WISCONSIN STUDIES IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY David Gergen interview of Jill Ker Conway, 1998 Scrapbooks: Ephemeral Autobiographies Narative Theory and Personal Identity bibliography Narrative Theory and Personal Identity: Bibliography North American Working Class Autobiographies Assessing Autobiography Barbara Harrison, Nod Miller and Helen Powell Kings College: Writing lives: literary biography and autobiography in theory, history and practice Berkeley Course in Visual Autobiography Dionysis Panos - Net-Dentity Project Autobiography in Cyberspace George P. Landow essays Web Autobiographies IdentityTheory.Com Jorn Barger Julia Lesage essays Biography.com Critical Criteria for Reading Online Visual Autobiography, Photographic Autobiography, Illustrated Life Stories and Autodocumentaries Here are some things that I look for. 1) Visuality Does the site do its primary work visually? Is my eye pleased? Words are fine, but I'm interested in the images. 2) Scale Does the site convey the sweep of a person's life... the process of change over time? Here the old and the middle aged have an advantage over the young, but those are the breaks. There ought to be SOME advantages to aging, and acquiring a history worth illustrating is surely one of them. I think that the autobiography of a child or 19 year old can also tell a visually meaningful story, but it will be a different kind of story. 3) Design Aesthetic Does the site have high production values? Is it an example of good web design? That means a lot of different things, but you and I both know it when we see it. It's not everything but it's not nothing either. 4) Completeness and Density Is the record fairly complete, with lots of years and phases represented? If you have seen my own autodocumentary you know that this mattered to me. I'm not saying it should matter to everyone, but I like visual stories that have a high chronological resolution. 5) Good Humor Does the author and documentarian seem to have a sense of humor? It never hurts. On the other hand, when the sense of humor undermines the sense of reality, undermines the "documentary spirit", then the visual autobiography moves into the realm of fiction. Such efforts are no less worthy, but they are not the same as a serious documentary effort to portray the self across time, and they belong to a different category of visual story.* 6) Taking "Reality" Seriously Is not autobiography an endless series of fictions about the self? Do we not write ourselves into existence? Is there really a world beyond the text? Although I once prayed in the temple of postmodernism and deconstruction, and enjoyed Rabbi Derrida's mysticism. I no longer do so. Alan Sokal made his point well, while Paul de Man's (1919-1983) literary arguments were revealed for their self serving political nature, and today I can only read Jacques Derrida by limiting the scope of his claims. Somewhere (maybe everywhere) there are students still learning about the author as a creative fiction, but this approach does little to help me understand the problem of self-representation in autobiography. Autobiography and autodocumentary are interesting because they are representations of that funny thing we call reality, not because they are fictions divorced from it. Autobiographical representations will deviate from reality, and those deviations are important for understanding the meaning of autobiographical texts and photographs, but representational writing (and representational arrangements of photographs) still take as their subject the one reality that exists beyond the text. They have an external referent, or they are not autobiography or autodocumentary. I don't apologize for being a scientist and an empiricist at heart. I believe in the nonfictional nature of "reality." I believe in the possibility of meaningfully unficticious writing. I don't find the idea of "nonfiction" to be "problematic." I find nonfiction (like science) to be complex, but only in the sense that it is difficult to do well, and never done perfectly. It is not complex in the sense that it is impossible, or hopelessly self negating, or fundamentally solipsistic. Nope. Explore those delightful postmodern thoughts, I say, but then move on to more interesting ones. Why Autobiography / Autodocumentary? 1) Time Past and Time Present I like to see what the past really looked like. Even a single picture of the past opens a window into an otherwise unknowable world. A series of pictures leading from the past to the present opens a door. Leaning forward, I can sometimes see a path down which I can walk. 2) Change I like to see how people change, outwardly, over time. In some way, it means that there is hope. 3) Meeting and Hope I like to "encounter" people who have represented their lives publicly. They say many things, but among those many things they seem to say through the act of historical or autobiographical visual self representation is this: "I accept myself as I was, as I became, and thus as I am." Or else they are reaching for that kind of self acceptance and self knowledge. Either way, there is beauty in it. 4) Historicity and Meaning I like to see evidence of historical consciousness in the world. There is too little of that I think. To see representations of personal history, makes it seem possible that human history as a whole also matters. Personal history is a kind of gateway to human history, an affirmation at the most basic level that history, the sequencing of events and experience, matters and reveals meaning. I think that I might believe (if I believe in anything) in the truth that reveals itself in the many faceted reality of history. I think that there is a sense in which history is in fact a kind of revelation. Alternatively, perhaps it is only a dancing screen of images and randomly swirling leaves upon which we can project our desires for meaning. But, whether a real locus of meaning, or an imagined one, I often feel that to see individuals struggling to represent their own history meaningfully is to be in the presence of something important. 5) Curiosity I wrote and went online with my own visual autobiography and, having done this, I'm curious to find out in what category of human beings I have placed myself. 6) Empiricism In spite of my comments above about fiction and non-fiction, I do like to think about the relationship between the two, and to contemplate where the border in fact lies. The problematic status of photography is fascinating. My own site is a documentary effort, but the images have been subtly manipulated. For example, identification numbers, signatures, and other details have been removed from many documents. Or, for example, pictures have been cropped so as not to use without permission the images of friends I am no longer in touch with. Furthermore, I have selected one image, and rejected another. I have linked these images together in a story that I claim (both to the reader and to myself) is a simple factual representation of my life. But I have also told the reader (on the "welcome" page) "my goal is to say nothing false. I have not told everything that is true. In any life there are many things better left unsaid." And so I have used photographs to create a kind of text. Although my purpose is documentary (and I would derive no personal satisfaction from my autodocumentary unless I believed in its factitudinal nature), nonetheless the reader is left with a puzzle. Does the photograph, in the age of Photoshop, deserve any privileged status as a representation of historical reality? In a practical sense, perhaps it does, because the amount of effort needed to misrepresent my own life would be vastly greater than any reasonable person would want to bother with, and I believe myself to both be, and seem to be, a reasonable person. But at the limits of the possible, and with sufficient budget and determination, fictions can be created with images too. Text is not the only way to create a fiction. In theory a person might seem to be anything or anyone. With or without photographs, "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog." Images of a person, and thus in a sense (but only in one sense) a person herself or himself, might be created out of whole cloth. I can't imagine why anyone would do such a thing, but the mere fact that it is possible makes it inevitable that someone will do so eventually. And when they do, I will probably link to that fictional visual representation just as readily as I have linked to all the sites above, and you and I will be left (and already are left, because of the theoretical possibility) to contemplate the extent to which there is a human reality beneath the surface that flickers across our screens. Other People I chose the name "otherpeople" for the file that contains this compendium of lives online, because it was about people other than me. More recently I was reminded of Sartre: "L'enfer c'est les autres!" (Hell is other people!) That may be true, but, then, one might argue with equal plausibility that other people are our salvation too. I don't know. As the lyrics deeply embedded in my brain say, "...come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now..." This page provides one with an opportunity to meditate on how one feels about "other people" at a level somewhere between the abstract and the particular. ~ I'm interested in your comments. Click here for my e-mail address.  readers since Jan.4, 2002 home Last revised April 2006 Slightly edited January 2007, but no longer actively maintained. |
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