Tiny Stories

"Just a minute," he said, as they waited to sing him Happy Birthday. The photo had 12 likes by the time the fire truck made it to the house. 

Little did her boyfriend know that on the other end was the man that was giving her the attention that he deprived her of. 

Years later her patients weren't appreciative of her I'll-finish-it-later method. 

Anna never knew irony until she read "drive safe," moments before she found herself face to face with an oncoming Ford Taurus. 

When the clock struck twelve no one knew how they had missed the ball drop. 

For my tiny stories I was influenced by a few different things, firstly I’ve been into taking these sort of pictures for a while, which was first influenced by a tweet by someone who made fun of people that take pictures of their food before they eat it. This combined with watching my little brother be on a laptop, iPad, and phone all at the same time started my obsession with catching people on technology either at a weird or funny time or when it is totally inappropriate which is fairly easy to find these days. Secondly, I was influenced by the commercials where they have those people telling stories about texting and driving where they end up killing a car load of cute little kids on the way to a petting zoo or something and the text that killed them read something like, ‘yeah bro, on my way.’ These commercials are really powerful to me because it hits close to home for pretty much anyone that has a phone because 99%* of texters that can drive do both at the same time (*made up statistic).

Technology is something that we are all so wrapped up in so I thought this would be a really interesting topic to cover. Most of the stories (since they are stories) are gross exaggerations of whatever was actually happening in the photo, which I think drives home the point more than something boring like, ‘they had to wait for him to finish the text to his girlfriend before they could sing him Happy Birthday’. And it is interesting to note that only one of the pictures that I took for this was actually posed (the one in Five Guys) because I thought it would be a good one for a story, but other than that they are all organic which is really depressing. 

I really tried to mimic the reading that we had by Dillard where she was so great with imagery, and I wanted to do the same but with way fewer words to be able to work with it was a little difficult to be as descriptive as she was, but I think I was at least semi decent at creating good visuals besides the ones that you were able to see within the picture. I also feel like I was drawn to morbidity because of the Tim Burton tiny stories that we read that were basically child horror stories. But like I said, I think that sometimes its important to maybe be more on the darker side like that because it makes more of an impact on the reader and will hopefully influence for good in the future.