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Retaliation: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Mahika Gupta (2017)

My photo consists of a worn out KKK hat, a white supremacist symbol, and several colored dyes. The KKK hat was placed in a fish tank filled with water while the symbol was painted on a piece of trace paper in the background. The KKK hat and symbol both represent white supremacy, and the idea of this photo is that the color dropped into the tank drowns out the hat and overtakes the symbol. I decided to shoot in complete darkness with only artificial light to get a bright, white, spotlight effect. This helps to support my concept because the idea of the photo is drowning out white supremacy with color and so I wanted the only color to be coming from the dye dropped in and to have the background remain a pure white.

This photo also ties into the concept statement disgust through the act of speaking up. In this image, “disgust” is symbolized by the KKK hat and white supremacist symbol and the ideals on which they are based on, especially the one where only white Christian males hold power. The “speaking up” is brought out by the colors that are drowning out the hat showing unity of the rest of the world against the radical white minority. This photo shows that white supremacy is not something that can be tolerated and it will be fought against by a multicolored myriad of voices drowning out the tyranny it spreads.

The biggest problem I ran into with my photo was that the KKK hat was not noticeable enough. Using Photoshop, I went in and made a selection of my hat and proceeded to attempting to increase exposure, saturation, and brightness to try and make it stand out. When that didn’t work, I used a color gradient, going from black and white at the top to colored in the bottom. This was more effective as the problem was all the color in the background was drowning out the hat. Therefore, after applying the gradient, the hat became more distinguishable.
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