I am C. Evelyn Lee. I grew up in South Korea, but I am currently in USA. I have a funny story of how I decided to make a portfolio website. It is a pretty long story be prepared… I have always liked taking photos. My friends will tell me that I take photos of weird things in strange angles. I could tell I had my own style of taking photos since I was pretty young. In the summer 2023, I studied in Rome for about 2 months. I wanted to take photos with a DSLR camera, so I had one lesson from my brother’s photographer friend before I went to Rome. I played around with my brother’s DSLR camera during the study abroad. I lived nearby the Vatican city, so I visited the Vatican museum alone when the entrance fee was free. I was walking down the underground exhibition of contemporary arts bridging the Vatican museum and the Sistine chapel. I was slowly appreciating the art pieces, and I stopped in front of a sculpture that violently shaken my emotion. The sculpture is “Il respiro del pensiero (The breath of thought)” by Roberto Almagno. For the first time in my life, I felt the art with my heart. I took photos and videos of the sculpture for about 20 minutes. My brother once told me, if you really like something, you can spend enormous amount of time doing it without being disturbed. I was really immersed in taking photos. I would say, photography is my way of interpreting arts.(I think I also like expressing myself through writing and oil pastels.) That was an enlightening moment of my life that I realized how deeply I want to pursue photography semi-professionally.
I do not have any professional knowledge in photography, but I have few photos that I want to share with people outside of my social cycle for further discussion. I wanted unbiased opinion of my photos, so I wanted to create anonymous instagram account for my photos like how Hermann Hesse published Demian with his pseudonym Emil Sinclair. (Maybe it is little bit different because he might have published with the pseudonym because he wanted people to think the book as a memoir, but superficially, I think you get my idea.) So deeply did I want the account to be anonymous, I created my account id based on my initial. I changed my characters into ASCII code and took the last 3 or 4 binary numbers to create the id. I needed a name, but I did not want to boringly use my initials. So, I gave a little bit more thought to it. Villa Borghese is one of my favorite places in Rome. Temple d'Esculape (Temple of Aesculapius) was in fact one of the first places that I visited. When I entered Villa Borghese, I felt like I time traveled to ancient Rome. As I walked around the temple, I became a daughter of Borghese family wearing a toga or stola. At first, I thought Aesculapius sculpture in the middle of temple was a goddess. After realizing the statue is Aesculapius and knowing who Aesculapius is, the temple touched my heart more personally because I hope to practice medicine in the future and medicine has been a subject that is intricately woven in my life—perhaps it is to everyone’s life, but it feels more particular to me. So, I decided to use Theraputae, a word related to the followers of Aesculapius, as my name. I submitted my id and name. Instagram thought that the account was made by robot. They made me take picture and do some weird things, but they end up not allowing me to create my anonymous account. It sounds very childish, but I got mad at Instagram—though not angry—and was salty about it. With my childish mindset, I was like “I am never posting my good photos on Instagram”😒 Thinking about it again, I thought it is probably the best compliment that I can ever get to my purpose of creating anonymous account because Instagram thought that the account was not made by a human. How anonymous robots are. Additionally, I thought this action of instagram defeats one of the best benefits of internet: people can communicate without revealing their identities. Since I was desperate to share my work/ideas, I wanted something to substitute Instagram, and then, I came up with the idea of creating my own website. I wanted to learn how to make a website, and I will also have more flexibility in expressing my ideas.