For my lyrical essay, Selfish Mirror, I interviewed someone with an eating disorder. The line I chose was “A distortion in the mirror, reflecting. A funhouse of horrors, stretching in all the wrong ways.” This line is meant to exemplify the way a person might feel when looking in a mirror.
I chose this specific photo to create an absolute metaphor for my lyrical essay. The person is looking away from the mirror, avoiding it, somewhat as the character feels in the passage, scared from their reflection. The pole serves as a guide and hopes that they might one day be able to get out of their current state. Although an older man might not be the most relatable subject since the subject of the lyrical essay is a teen girl. Yet, it can serve as another metaphor for the way she views herself, or how she believes the time is ticking too quickly that she cannot heal, and the man is wearing a watch as well. The second image, which is the silhouette, I decided to have all the words stretched and distorted like the way the girl views herself, which is not the way that others see her.
Editing my photo took a lot of time to get the right mood across. The first step was to create a dramatic black and white version of the picture. I added a vignette to create a feathered look and draw the viewer‘s eyes to the middle of the image. We were then asked to bring back some color to the picture, so on top of the black and white effect I added earlier, I took the brush and started taking away some of the blackness to reveal the color underneath the impact. For the silhouette effect, we had to trace over the figure and copy it in either black or white. I decided on black because the photo would merge with the black image beside it otherwise if the background were black. Then I had to decide on a font. I chose a typewriter-style because it gave the intensity of a horror feel I was looking for that went along with the text. To place my writing, I would first write the word, then change the side and stretch it according to the place it had to fill up. I then rasterized the letters and transformed them with a warp. Then I would streak teach them to fill up the precise place that they are in on the person.
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