Junior Conceptual: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Leandro Andrade (2016)

Our protagonist has been unjustly incarcerated and ostracized by society. When they return to the outside world after three years, they feel forgotten and worthless because the world has moved on without them. I chose this poem as inspiration because I feel like the subject of my other poems were much harder to convey in a photograph and the meaning would be lost on most people. The image represents this feeling of worthlessness by displaying a penny, which has very little value, in a gutter, a dirty, grimy place, reserved for waste and trash.

I started with a clean penny, to represent the speaker, who has done nothing wrong. The wire wrapped around the coin is a claustrophobic cage, like the jail cell in the poem. The gutter furthers the speaker’s feeling of worthlessness. I increased the saturation and vibrance of the penny in Photoshop, to make it stand out a little more. I also bumped up the yellow
orange of the leaves to make them seem more like they’re golden.