Our first project for this class is called the ‘Newborns’ project, and is about exploring the lives of Kosovars in this generation after the war. With partners, we are to conduct an interview and make a series of images to go along with the audio we decide to use from the interview. Coming into this project, I didn’t expect to have a ton of work to do since Meredith and Jeta had spent so much time and effort making sure they contacted people already and confirmed that they would be interested in partaking in this project. However I found that, for whatever reason, something about this project whether it be the project itself or even the fact that it lined up right around the time Bajram celebrations were happening, was not clear to those who previously agreed to be subjects for it.
In class during the end of the first week, we were assigned partners and were to draw a number out of a hat. We chose number one, and was given information on who our subject was and her phone number to communicate with her. Later that night we messaged her and decided to meet up the following Monday to simply get a coffee to get to know each other a little before the interview. When Monday came around however, she had to push it to Thursday of that week. So we decided we would just jump straight into interviewing when we met with her on Thursday. Come Wednesday night and we are trying to figure out a time to do the interview on the following day and she tells us that she actually won’t be available until this Monday, July 11, 2016.
My partner and I decided that this would be too late to get all of the work we needed to get done on our project, so we found a new subject. Everything was set for the interview the next day around 10 am, however, you guessed it, 10am comes around and our new subject won’t answer any of our messages. My partner and I later find out that she was asleep until nearly 4pm. At this point we are getting a little frantic about finding a subject who will actually be able to follow through with this project. So we tagged along with Beki and her partner that morning to see if their subject might have a friend we could use as a subject. Turned out he did! So we messaged the girl who he said agreed to the project and planned to meet with her that night, this being Saturday night now, around 8pm. We were excited; she was a ballerina and seemed to be open to this project. Then around 7pm, we get a message. For the third time, our subject has bailed on us. It is just becoming a little ridiculous to us at this point that no one will actually commit and follow through with this project.
In the end, we successfully found a subject who agreed to help us with the project and has followed through. We have already finished the interview now, and have begun photographing and will continue tomorrow July, 11, 2016. You could say this project has been a bit of a fiasco, but it’s coming together quickly and soon enough we’ll move on to work on the final project.