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Observing and Hiding

mturer's picture


                     Life at Bryn Mawr is weird. I know that is not very groundbreaking or even descriptive, but that is the only word I can find sometimes to describe this place. Bryn Mawr is weird. I have always known this. This, to me, is something that needs to be foregrounded, which is why I chose this picture. How did they even get up there? What are they doing? Has anyone noticed them yet? I have no idea. We are all used to not having an idea. After a first year of seeing Latin, cloaks, public nudity, a duck pond run, and may poles, I am so very used to it. Thomas Great Hall is another good representation from this picture as an academic building, because we eccentric people like to learn. I have unfortunately put nature in the background by choosing this picture, and I would have liked this picture to have included something natural because our trees, flowers, and grounds are an important part of our community. My weekly spot, though, is a part of nature. I can’t get up there (I would if I could), but I can still hide myself in plain sight in a place everyone sees but few people think to go. There is a tree next to Rockefeller, a Weeping Hemlock, that creates a whole world completely surrounded by its branches. My favorite part about this tree is that it sits right underneath the dorm and directly to the side of a busy sidewalk. Everything goes on around me, but nobody is going to notice me. Does anybody ever think to look up and make sure nobody is standing more than two stories up in the decorations of Thomas? No. And not many people think to go check inside of a tree’s branches to see if anyone might be sitting in it. 

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mturer's picture

Revisiting: The Good and Bad of Anthropocentrism

This is a very “anthropocentric” image. Humans are centered and foregrounded, but I still stand by my choice of representation. I think the people that make up our community are a more important part of Bryn Mawr than “ecological” attributes because we are what makes Bryn Mawr unique. The idea of “campus” is illustrated here in an interesting way, because an argument could be made that the campus is represented and one could be made that it is not. The ecological aspects of the campus are not included, but can they really be grouped into the idea of a campus? I am not sure if ecosystems should be grouped into a human-created concept simply because we happen to join them. This seems a bit too anthropocentric of us. I think we can foreground ourselves in institutions that we have created, but we cannot shape the rest of the world to fit into our own terminology.