Great Shame: A Senior Listener Lyric Photographic Diptych by Sarah Chiu (2017)

My Listener Lyric Essay is about the identity of being a Trump supporter in the Silicon Valley and how there is hidden struggle and discrimination in that experience. I learned from my interview that a thicker skin is formed through the experience and those who relate with the identity are often silenced.

I chose the passage, “Shame. Shame. Shame. They hope. But why should you feel shame for exercising your rights?” because it displays the identity clearly while also showing the endurance behind it. It stood out to me also because it ties in the modern movement of liberals yelling “shame” to people if they see them wearing a “Make America Great Again” shirt, something that was highlighted in my essay.

Since the original photo was actually a little over double the size of what I used in my final product, cropping the photo caused some focusing issue. The main subject of the photo wasn’t completely in focus when I first started so I had to go into Photoshop and use the sharpen tool give him more definition and detail. I then used the pen tool to create a precise selection of my subject’s shirt, creating dozens of points and anchors to make sure it was as detailed as possible. After making the entire photo black and white I loaded my selection of the subject’s shirt and filled that with a translucent red color. I feel that the passage is well fit to the final photo after editing because the red coloration of the shirt highlights the red “Make America Great Again” shirt that the subject of my lyrical essay is wearing. The figure in the background is also very symbolic because his chin is up and he is higher in the shot than the subject in the foreground who has his head hanging, seemingly in shame. To place my text, I went into Adobe Illustrator and filled a rough selection of the shadowed man in the background with text. I chose my font because it was a standard, sans-serif font. I did not want the style of the font to take away from the passage. I also made this choice because even with a simple, easy to ready font, the way Illustrator manipulated the text made it hardly legible.