Different Shades: A Senior Listener Lyric Photographic Diptych by Shivam Kumar (2017)

My Lyric essay, titled “Different Shades,” is about my friend facing challenges in his, soon to be, high school life. He is a Homosexual who happens to be African American. I learned from my subject that it could be really hard to open up as gay especially when no one around is the same.

The reason I chose this subject is because it is interesting to explore someone who does not have the same sexual identity as me as well as have them talk through the whole process of converting. I know understand a lot more about the community and have better knowledge on how people view this topic. I have always had empathy for my friend and supported him throughout his transition and have more of a scope on how other people that don’t have the same kind of acceptance tackle this subject. I chose this image because I thought it would be a good representation of what I was given to analyze. The picture is supposed to represent loneliness to everyone else while letting your inner demons accompany you.

The techniques that I used to edit this photo were adding a color layer on top of the whole image to make it black and white and then go over it again to edit the main subject to stand out. I also used illustrator to make the siloet of the subject on the side as well as the text inside.