N/A: A Senior Listener Lyric Photographic Diptych by Caroline Keosaksith (2017)

My listener lyric essay tells the experience of somebody with a different sexual orientation and gender identity and the disregard and judgement they face. I learned from my interview subject that, because of who their identity and who they are, they have much less respect towards them.

In my essay, the reader understands the situations that the subject deals with in their life. They discover that when they bring up subjects relating to having a different sexual orientation or gender identity, their peers don’t listen, or think that they only bring it up because they are one of them. Their friends judge them for what they say, and they try to identify them. This connects to the passage that inspired my photography, “You have been so covered in labels that other people have stuck on you that you’ve become invisible.” In my photo, there is a lady sitting on the sidewalk asking for money. While taking this photo, I thought that in ways, she was similar to my interview subject because she seemed so small which gave bypassers the right to label her. In this photo, you can see her invisibility, as she is ignored by the other girl in the photo, and by the world around her. Her face also expresses the sadness and loneliness from her invisibility.

I edited this photo with a clear focus on the woman, because she is slightly saturated while her surroundings are grayscale. I did this in Photoshop by creating a selection for the background and lowering its saturation fully, and then selecting the woman and lowering the saturation almost all the way. On the right side of the diptych, I have my passage in the form of the woman in the photo. To do this, I individually warped each word so that the sentence as a whole would fit to the subject’s silhouette. Finally the font I used for this was Arial bold. Although this is often seemed as a simple font, I used it because it is bold and strong, to show how although my subjects from my essay and photo are small and invisible to the people around them, I wanted to show how that is not what they are and to create that contrast.