Our Unit Two essay was about choosing a lens with which to base our argument about a photo essay by Walker Evans. Not only were we analyzing images, like in Unit Three, but we were also taking into account a multitude of other sources, such as the writings of critics and other photographers, and looking for the relationship between their ideas and ours with regards to the set of images we were studying, which we called our 'data set'. For my essay in particular, I based my argument on the ideas of Richard Avedon in his essay "Borrowed Dogs". My thesis went as follows: "Though Avedon believes that manipulation leads to personal intensity in a portrait, the manipulation of Walker Evans's portraits seems to create meanings that criticize Cuban life, rather than connect their subjects with viewers." As my evidence, I cropped some of Evans's portraits closely around the faces of the subjects, and wrote about how much more powerful they could be if they didn't have such distracting elements surrounding them, making the viewers think less about them as individuals and more about them as symbols of Cuban life.
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For example, in order to form an argument about the painting, "Watson and The Shark" by John Singleton Copley, we first approached it by creating a list of specific, detailed, and true statements that we could potentially use as evidence in our essays. Then, once these statements were reviewed multiple times and perfected, we had cultivated the skills to look for valid evidence that pointed to a thesis. These skills helped us to create visual outlines, with which we got to really plan the structure of our essays by isolating separate portions of the painting (like below), creating more analytical statements about each one, and organizing our analytical moves in a way that flows