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Resilience: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Olivia Ahrens (2018)

I am exploring the feeling of despair through the experience of living. The objects I use in my picture are a wheelchair and a football. A tragic car accident left my mother paralyzed three weeks after she gave birth to me, her only child. She always wanted to be a mom and one moment in time deprived her from doing so many things that most women get to experience with their children. Despite physical limitations, she is the strongest person I know and has persevered through unimaginable obstacles. She is a graduate from The University of Austin Texas, and has always been a huge football fan. When the school found out about the crash, the football team signed a football and sent it to our family. I decided to use this object in my photo because football always brightens my mom’s day and provides her with a more positive outlook on her life. Although she could feel despair from being trapped by a wheelchair, activities, such as football, allow for her to experience the joys of life. I took this photo from the ground at an upward angle, with the focus on the football. I placed the football on the footrest of the wheelchair, with the other footrest up, to make it look like someone got out of the wheelchair. The wheelchair is placed in front of a wooden fence to symbolize being trapped, and the lighting was mostly dark to symbolize a dark moment in life. Since the football is white, it adds to its meaning of a highlight of living and how life has its beauty even in times of despair.

My photograph exemplifies the concept statement from English because being in a wheelchair makes many people feel despair because they imagine what their life would be like if they did not have their disability. The football in this image represents the experience of living because it is the resilience of getting through obstacles. Everyone goes through rough patches in life, but life goes on and you figure out how to get past the situation. In Photoshop, I adjusted the brightness, contrast, and overall, visual appearance of my image. In design, we have learned how to use almost all of the tools in Photoshop, however my photograph did not need complex changes. Related website
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