To live is to experience, to enjoy, to savor. Existing is just running through the motions, living life to move on to the next day, rather than living to experience each moment. This concept is something that occupies my thoughts often. It is very important to me to enjoy everything I am doing, I want to have a purpose and a meaning and life. I want my life to mean something and I am terrified of just existing. This purpose in life doesn’t necessarily need to be fame or fortune, like so many picture when thinking of success. I just want to have helped better something whether that is a person, a community, or the world I want my name to have meant something to someone. I often ponder how to reach this goal and worry what if I live my whole life without contributing anything. I think about this so often that sometimes I’m missing out on life focusing on what my life means.

    The piece is to show that people tend to fall victim of missing out on living life. The flowers are poppy flowers which is a symbol of sleep in the movie Wizard of Oz. I wanted to use this symbol to show that the subject in a hazy, dream-like state where they are not truly living and they are worrying rather than living. I wanted to have the subject have her eyes closed to make it look like she’s going through life so pointlessly it’s almost as if she is sleeping, however, after shooting some pictures with the model’s eyes closed it looked like she was dead which was not the idea behind this concept so I wanted her eyes to be open. Even though this picture looks beautiful, it is lifeless. The girl is so rapped up in novel things such as beauty and appearance that she is not living. Instead of remembering the way she felt with her friends, or how happy she was when she won her soccer happy she thinking about how she looked or what she did which is not the way I want to live my life.

I felt like I lived this way for many years and it was lifeless and sad compared to the fun, exciting life I live today with a care-free mentality.