After watching and reading the media by Tan and Vilem, I started looking for possible connections between and to the pair. I watched Tan’s Ted talk first, and one point that really stuck out to me was how once she finished and sold her books, they no longer were hers, but became her readers’.  To me, this statement makes perfect sense; once the creator has finished their work, it’s now up to the interpretation of the viewers. I spent my early education engulfed in blue-curtain metaphors and while, to some extent, there is a standard interpretation of literature, I always found myself thinking of different ways to see what the author wrote, especially in connecting through their past experiences, or mine.

The same idea was brought up in Vilem’s excerpt, where the creator encodes a meaning (takes the picture) and the viewer decodes it. While I appreciated the acknowledgement of this creator-critic relationship in Tan’s video, it was much harder to digest in Vilem’s work. At first it didn’t make much sense why I would feel this way, but after looking up at all the photos I’ve taken hanging on my wall, I realized my fears of “giving” my work away to viewers stemmed from my attachment to the photos. My photos are essentially different parts of me- an emotion I felt while taking the photo, the memories of events that took place in my lifetime, the way I see myself through these inanimate objects. While it’s easy for me to digest others’ works, it’s very hard to think about my own creations being decoded by those who have no understanding of life through my eyes. Seeing that statement written out, it sounds pretentious or contradictory to my previous thoughts, but I think it stems more from a sense of fear of wrong intentions, both perceived and received, that I’m struggling with the idea of. Just like Tan, I don’t want my intentions (as created in my photographs) to be tampered with. Perhaps I should share them, and maybe I will be pleasantly surprised by what’s decoded, perhaps I won’t. Either way, I know my intentions and my meaning, and right now that’s all that matters.