I've got some scattered pictures lying on my bedroom floor

I've been obsessed with photography lately. I'm getting wrapped up in my final project which I've created so that I don't have to travel off campus and drive all over LA this time to get the prints I want. I decided to do an examination of my sorority and a reflection on my self in visual diary format. I want to do a myth versus reality thing and also a study on identity. What identity is needed? In this day and age, do you really need to fit a mold to be accepted? These are all things I hope to explore and in the end I hope to tie it into a good final project. I'm struggling a bit with connecting my ideas with actual visual markers, but I figure I'm just going to go to the house every night this week for activities and shoot as many rolls as I can and I'll probably find some prints I like. In the process, I'm becoming a lot like that guy from American Beauty with his video camera...not exactly a role I want to take on. People are always wondering why I'm taking their picture. It's a fine line between staged and real emotion and it's interesting to see what people will do when they know they're in front of the camera even when they are trying to be laid back and unposed (straighten up, put on a nervous smile, keep glancing at the camera). People are more than happy to pose usually, but keep asking me for direction and I don't know what to tell them. If you have any good input or ideas, let me know cuz I'm fumbling a bit with this one.

Being in photography has introduced me to a lot of new artists from the past few decades that are really interesting. I was looking through a book of Robert Frank pictures in his "America" series which are so amazing and fundamental, but he had gotten Jack Kerouac to write some quotes I think are interesting.

"A picture that should have been blown up and hung in the street of Little Rock showing love under the sky and in the womb of our universe the mother--and the loveliest picture ever made, the urinals that women never see, the shoeshine going on in sad eternity." --Kerouac

As far as inspiration for my upcoming project, I found an artist named Nikki Lee. I actually knew about her last year but I just bought her book this week. It's called "Projects" where she spent months studying and preparing a certain social group and then infiltrated it to see if she could be accepted or find common empathy. There was the Punk project, the Ohio Project, the tourist project, the Stripper project, the schoolgirl project, the senior citizen project, the yuppie project etc. Very cool stuff. Obviously I don't have the capacity to dress up and seek out social groups and I'm not going to become a stripper for this project, but hopefully will keep in mind that idea of identity. She says:

"People call me a chameleon--it's a cliche and people are too lazy to invent new words, but I forgive them. Changing myself is part of my identity. That's never changed. I'm just playing with forms of changing. My work is really simple, actually. I wanted to make evidence. I always feel like I have a lot of different characters inside and I was curious to understand these things. I wanted to see some sort of evidence that I could be all those different things." -nikki lee, projects