“Ahead lies your future, behind lies your past. And your family. And your country.” This passage is meant to communicate the feeling of loss and dread that someone who is fleeing a war torn country may be feeling.
The photo I chose was one that I took at the train station in downtown Mountain View of a woman boarding a train. I chose this shot because of its theme of departure. My subject was someone who was forced to flee their home during the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. Just as how my subject boarded a helicopter headed out of their hometown of Can Tho, the woman in the photo is departing what may be her hometown for someplace else. The photo compliments the message of my essay because as soon as that woman sets foot on that train, she’s going to leave behind her past for wherever the train takes her. That is why I felt that this particular photo was the one that I should use to represent my lyrical essay.
To edit my photo I first put a black and white layer over it then using a blending mask and the brush tool, I masked out the black and white over the subject to give her color. This helped to make the subject feel out of place which is how a refugee forced to leave might feel in a new land. For the other half of the diptych, I used the fill tool to make my subject black and then filled them with white text. I used an army/stencil font to emphasize the themes of war and conflict in my essay and passage. To warp the text I turned the text into shapes and used the pen and direct selection tool to manipulate the letters to fill the entire figure.
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