Pine-Appealing to the Surrealist's Eye: A Senior Surreal Photo by Arlene Oriel (2015)

My surrealist piece features a pineapple in an unusual setting for a pineapple: foggy darkness. Parts of the pineapple skin are erased, exposing what's inside. What's inside is not what one would expect. Instead of the yellow pineapple flesh that is typically inside a pineapple, the inside of the pineapple in my surrealist piece is the distorted inside of a refrigerator. To create this piece, I used Photoshop. For each picture, I merged together at least three photos that were taken with different shutter speeds into one High Definition Range (or HDR) photo. I placed a photo of part of the inside of my refrigerator under the photo of the pineapple and erased parts of the pineapple image to reveal the underlying photo.

We see the mystical pineapple, engulfed in eerie fog. Upon closer inspection, the pineapple is no normal pineapple. It is bigger on the inside, and it becomes apparent that it actually acts as a refrigerator, as it contains food and drink items that would typically be found in a refrigerator. The food and drink items inside the pineapple are also far from ordinary. They are distorted. I chose to use a pineapple in my piece because I knew that a pineapple would look amazing in HDR. I chose to use a dark, eerie setting because I knew that the pineapple would automatically be perceived as out-of-place. From that point, I knew that I wanted to put something strange inside the pineapple. I decided to use a photo of the contents of my refrigerator. I decided, even then, that it just wasn't bizarre enough, so I transformed and distorted the image of the refrigerator contents. My own interpretation for my piece is that it shows that you may find familiar things in unexpected places but you may end up discovering that those familiar things aren't as familiar as you had originally thought them to be.