Challenging Utopia: Oberlin College

Challenging Utopia: Oberlin College

I used this utopia project to question and critique the utopian nature of Oberlin College. Generally, the experience of college is intended to remove young adults from the reality of the “real” world and place them in a space where theoretically problems of the outside world cannot infiltrate. Oberlin College—similar to that of many other colleges—is constructed as a “utopian” space where students can benefit from this exclusionary environment in order to grow as artists, intellectuals, and individuals. My photographs serve to challenge this utopia, illuminating the artificiality, the irony and the contradictions that it embodies. Furthermore this project raises two questions: how real is the utopia of Oberlin? and who sustains this utopia of Oberlin?

My first photograph of Wilder Bowl represents the pulse and center of our progressive “utopian” community in which students lie complacent, while only two blocks away extreme poverty prevails. The second photograph serves to embody the lack of accountability enjoyed by students within this “utopia.” Lastly, the third photograph functions to address the political and social consciousness of the student body while paradoxically highlighting the nature in which students' utopian experience is catered to them, both literally and figuratively.