WENDY LI: I have an interesting relationship with photography.
I came to this point last year where
I didn't know if I wanted to even make photographs anymore.
And I didn't know what I wanted to take photographs of.
I went back to sort of asking myself--
why do I love photography?
And what about photography makes it so interesting
and makes it worth my time?
My name is Wendy Li.
I'm in the class of 2015.
And I'm concentrating in the Woodrow Wilson School
with a certificate in visual arts.
So while I'm writing a thesis for the Woodrow Wilson School
on the role of women in developing economies,
specifically in rural China, this thesis
is specifically to fulfil the requirement for my visual arts
certificate.
My senior thesis is about the process
of discovering your identity and of creating memories
through photographs.
I went back to the first photographs
I was ever exposed to, which were my family photographs.
And I realized that my love of photography
really came from these photographs and everything
that they contained.
What you see behind me is actually the manifestation
of the process of discovering who I am
and who my family is, especially because we're immigrants
and because most of my family I've never met before.
These photographs were really a way
to process that information.
JOE SCANLAN: As an advisor, where I gave her
maybe the most helpful advice was helping her figure out
what kind of structure the show should have.
There were so many threads that went through the show.
You could pick up any one of them
and have a really meaningful experience in the exhibition
and maybe not ever really have the same experience that Wendy
has with the material.
But it wouldn't mean that your experience was any less
valuable.
WENDY LI: In some ways I kind of see
my work in the Woodrow Wilson School
as being completely opposite from my work
in the visual arts.
And I think the two work very well
and are sort of symmetrical.
This project I think really sort of distills a lot
of what we think of as abstract political ideas.
We think of economic reform as a very abstract
political economic idea.
We think of migration also as a very sort
of abstract international concept.
What a lot of people don't realize, I think,
especially, is that these are very real human things that
are happening and they're real human experiences.
And so even though I spent so much time in the Wilson School
going through data sets, combing through international relations
theory and political philosophy, a lot of it
still doesn't really matter until you tie it back
to real people.
Most people would be able to see these photos
and instantly recognize that they're personal photos.
A lot of people will look at these photographs
and think, oh, these are photos that
could be in history textbooks.
They're very removed, especially for,
I think, the average American student at Princeton.
They would look at these and not be
able to relate to them personally at all.
But I think when people start moving through the timeline,
and they realize that the same people are
in all of these photographs, and as the photographs become
more approachable and more familiar,
that they'll realize that these seemingly alien concepts are
actually real experiences that you can relate to.