Togetherness: A Junior Self-Portrait Diptych by Arlene Oriel (2013)

On the left side of my diptych, I have a picture of an apple on top of a Physics book. For this side, the word I focused on was ''gravity.'' This comes from the line ''a shattered crystal dove figurine'' from my poem that was written in English. Our task was to portray an image from our poem with a metaphor, rather than something that directly portrayed the image. We were to avoid literal representations in this assignment. My original plan was to take a picture of just an apple. When most people hear the word gravity, apples are probably one of the first things that come to mind. In the final picture I decided to place the apple on top of a Physics textbook with the title clearly showing, to emphasize that the apple was supposed to portray gravity.

On the right side of my diptych, I focused on the word ''glue.'' This is from the line of the poem that says ''it’s time to get the super glue.'' In order to avoid literality, I could not just simply take a picture of glue. I had to find another thing that holds things together, so I chose paper clips as the subject for my photo. Instead of placing the paper clips on a plain, black surface, I positioned them on top of notes from a class to make the picture more visually appealing to the viewer.

In Design, we were to come up with a statement using two images from our poem that we had written in English that would later be the subject of our diptych. My statement, which unites the two very different subject matters, was ''Glue is like gravity because it holds things together.'' As for visual unity, the black backgrounds behind each one flow into each other at one part of the divide, so it’s as if the two images are interconnected. to emphasize my subjects in both pictures, I followed the rule of thirds as much as I could. I also positioned the photos so that there was distance between the subjects and that they were in different positions. I placed them both on subjects that have to do with school work. The distance and positions emphasize the difference in the two images, and the subjects I placed them on are used to reinforce the similarity between the images and the fact that the images are connected in some way.