We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.

Human beings do not go hand in

hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the
print of birds' feet is unknown.

-- Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill

Introduction
One of Woolfs fundamental concerns is that of empathy - whether it is possible to
overcome the barriers of individual ego, of gender and nationality, to achieve a universal
empathy for others. Her essay Three Guineas is her most explicit statement of her goals as a
novelist; Woolf feels it her duty to remind and persuade her readers of the communality of
humanity through the only path open to her as the daughter of an educated man, which is
writing. This goal can be seen to drive Woolfs experimentation with form, where she mingles
past and present, fact and fiction. In doing so, she aims to do with words what she sees in
photographs. Photographs, Woolf asserts, are statements that human nature remains the same
everywhere and in all times, the same today as they were 2,000 years ago. Not only does war
and its players reoccur throughout history, photographs of war cannot fail to arouse horror and
disgust, or an instinctive compassion, in whoever views them.
I decided to explore Woolfs concern of empathy via the medium of film, with a total of six
videos compiled into one. In each video, I show a participant a series of six images taken from
1936-1937, over the period Three Guineas was written. The majority of these images were
taken from The Times, and Woolf was thus likely to have seen them. The subjects of the images
were a funeral, a wedding, a peaceful garden. a flooded plain, a circus performance, and dead
bodies lying in a bombed town square. The photographs were selected to encompass a wide
slice of life in the era, from images that are comprehensible today to images that seem strange
and bizarre to modern eyes. The last photograph, of Guernica, was selected to test the

participants responses to photographs of war. The participants were asked to describe each
image to the viewer, who cannot see the photograph being described.
In this project, I wanted to explore the tension between empathy and difference. I wanted
to see how the photographs triggered empathy for people in Woolfs time and country, as well
as the similarity in responses across participants. At the same time, I wanted to see the way in
which participants perspectives differed, even when presented with the same crude statement
of fact

to the eye, much in the manner of The Waves. By not showing the photograph to the
viewer, I also wanted to see how the words of the interviewees create subjective and imagined
images in the viewers mind, thus recreating the same activity carried out in the video, as well as
the central goal of Woolfs writing. The participants interviewed include my classmates,
suitemates, and close friends, as I wanted to see how I can know a person, and yet be
completely unaware of (and never, ever be able to fully understand) the way they see things
through their eyes.

Process
When interviewing participants, what surprised me was how closely differences in
perspectives corresponded

to the differences between characters in The Waves. Just like in

The Waves, participants focused visually on different aspects of the pictures, with vastly
differing observations of line, shape, and form. It was fascinating to see what their observations
revealed about their thought processes; one of my friends (participant 5) had an intensely
logical descriptive flow which moved from interior to exterior, breaking down elements into
geometric forms and seeing the image as a gestalt or a structured whole. Other participants
would see the light of the image, or the movement. At times, it almost sounded as if they were
looking at different photographs of the same event. The differences in the way they perceived

the literal image struck me even more than the metaphorical meaning they gave to the images,
because it was such a clear indication of the way even what we perceive as a statement of
unshakeable fact is subjective. This was only added to by the way participants drew
connections and gave meaning to the content of the image, reflecting different backgrounds and
perspectives. In particular, something which struck me was while many participants described
the wedding photograph as one depicting happiness, participant 1 described the bride as being
weighed down by her dress, later elaborating after the video ended that this was due to her
instinctive bias against marriage.
The segment of the video I would like to focus on is the segment where they describe a
photograph of Guernica after it was bombed. The responses I chose to include in the
compilation focus on the bodies on the ground. What struck me was that while most participants
immediately identified them as bodies, participant 5 perceived them first as visual objects. In her
individual video, she puzzled over whether they were bodies, eventually saying that the
highlights on the objects looked like the contours of an outstretched hand. Her response
seemed to point towards the flattening of information within a photograph; the way in which
visual form can override empathy, and the risk of the artistic fiction overwhelming the content it
portrays. Yet it also pointed to an instinctive understanding of how war objectifies its victims,
stripping bodies of their humanity and turning them into scarecrows (participant 5). Participant
1 and 3 had very similar responses, focusing on the way the bodies seemed to have been
arranged. Their imagining of an anonymous person in the far away past gathering and laying
out the bodies struck me as a very universal reaction to death; the human urge to somehow
soothe, make better, to pay respects. However, what I did not show in the compilation was the
detached manner of participants 2 and 6, who saw these photographs merely as historical
artifacts, analyzing them from an academic and removed perspective.

When editing and compiling the videos, I was very aware that I was creating a narrative
and authoring the way the participants reactions were perceived. I was reminded of Woolfs
criticism of the cinema. Woolf identifies the medium of cinema as capable of portraying the
passage of time and the suggestiveness of reality by its presentation of the hyper-real, as it is
able to play with time and happenings in a way that looks real but is not bound by the rules of
reality. Yet at the same time, the plentitude of images and sounds causes eye and brain [to be]
torn asunder as they are overwhelmed with superficial stimuli that fails to reveal the characters
interior states. The cinema, to Woolf, can thus be mere distraction, a frivolous form of
entertainment. As such, I attempted to create a video with a jumpy, non-linear progression of
time, where the literal image was less important than the affect and thoughts of the participants.
Every new participant fascinated me because it was like seeing the images all over
again. I had given the photographs only a cursory inspection when selecting them, because the
captions told me what to expect. As such, listening to their descriptions really did make me feel
like I was seeing a new picture in my mind. In the process of filming the videos over the course
of one day, I realized that the passage of time within the videos corresponded with The Waves,
from morning to sunset. This made my journey with the videos feel to me like a unified whole,
simultaneously a sliced out segment of responses and a representation of the whole of history.

Reflections and conclusion

In some ways, the responses I got surprised and delighted me; in other ways, I felt let
down. Overall, the project felt like an intimate dance with the participants, one in which our input
mutually shaped and responded to each other.
I felt like I pulled my punches with the images; I would have liked to show photos of war
that were truly jarring and horrifying, something which would force the participants to viscerally

recoil. The image I showed did not have much of an effect on a few of the participants (who saw
it as an opportunity to display their training as historians), with almost all displaying some form
of self-distancing from the photo. In that sense, I think my project did not succeed in causing
participants in empathizing with history, as they continued seeing history in a rational rather than
emotional way. However, I felt that my photographs that were more light-hearted did have an
effect on them; I enjoyed watching participants puzzle over and be delighted over slices of the
past.
What stood out to me in the end was the personality of each participant, much like the
personalities of the characters in The Waves. This was what truly made me glad that I decided
to rely so heavily on the responses of participants in shaping my creative project. The complete
unpredictability of the responses made me feel like each video was a person in itself, or a
captured moment. Even if I interviewed that person again, I would not be able to capture the
same response because they would not be the same person any longer. This was what helped
me understand the tension Woolf deals with - while at first I thought that she calls for a reduction
of differences between people, I realized that the androgynous mind she seeks is more of a
mind capable of holding and accepting the different perspectives that inevitably originate from
the differences that set people apart. For a brief moment, listening to each participant, I felt as if
Id managed to set foot upon the snowfield in their mind.