Erin Brady

My name is Erin Brady, and I am a Corporate Communications major here at Arcadia. I was also given the opportunity to study abroad in Shanghai, China for a semester. This project is my first foray into photography. I decided to do a photo project to push my capabilities, as it’s something I’ve always been interested in, but have never had a reason to dive into. This was a perfect opportunity to test my skills, and learn something new.

This project is titled “Little Bits of Chaos.” Originally I began the project not really knowing where to go with the photos, other than knowing they were going to be polaroid’s. After that I realized that most of my photos did look similar, without having to force a theme on myself. I really liked the way the polaroid naturally dims the colors in a photo and makes them more neutral, so in many of my photos I attempted to show color, but in a more muted sense. I also wanted to showcase my friends, and how any weird little corner can be a great place for a picture. In the beginning of this project I had a lot of ides that were unable to pan out due to everything that’s going on in the world right now. For instance, I wanted fewer pictures of myself, but it’s a little hard to take pictures of people when you’re supposed to social distance. Regardless, this photo project is the culmination of months of planning, but it still ended up a little bit chaotic in the end.

                Ideology and hegemony are very broad theories that can be best defined by the pst-Marxist theorists; Gramsci, Althusser, and Barthes, as well as the post-Nietzschean Foucault. Essentially ideology is the study of knowledge or ideas, and is closely connected to the ideals of the era of Enlightenment. Ideology is used to discover the ways people relate socially, and how they explain their existence. Hegemony on the other hand is where ideology becomes forced upon the masses by a dominant class. In the modern era, the dominant class does not have to refer to a system of government, but rather to a dominant way of thought, such as pop culture. This dominant class uses hegemony to broaden its ideas through the ideology it promotes e.g. The Crusades. This paper will expand upon these ideas from the perspective of the four theorists mentioned above.