Street Photography Contact Sheet
We were asked to take street photos. We learned the techniques on how to take good street photos without getting too much attention from the subjects. We had to put the camera at our wast and keep the auto focus on.
Citizen Project
In the citizen project we interviewed a member of our society that has an interesting story to tell. We had to then take a step in their shoes and write a lyrical poem of their situation without revealing their identity. We took one of the most meaningful lines in the poem to create this art work on top of a street photo we took earlier. We created it on Adobe Photoshop.
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.
Movie Poster
This project was supposed to emulate a real world production of a movie poster. After choosing an artist that we focused on in an earlier essay, we used their style and timeline to come up with a story line. We wrote a story then we had to pick the most memorable scene and the theme. i chose horror after researching Magritte surrealist paintings. I created this piece on Adobe Photoshop.
It is 1928, in a little town near Boston, many women have recently gone missing. The police started to investigate the strange situation but quickly gave up when the trail went cold. The daughter of the sheriff, Helen, decided to investigate on her own after her close friend disappeared. After getting her hands on the police report, Helen found all the disappearances lead to a specific speakeasy, which is a hidden underground bar disguised as a standard store during the prohibition in the 1920s. After furthering her search clues revealed intriguing details about the bar owner. Helen disappeared soon after her investigation began. He knew she’s been watching him. As depicted in my movie poster, the scene portrayed is of the scene where Helen is abducted brutally. Aggressively the abductor’s hand is placed over her face, and as she tries to scream, a pillowcase is shrouded over her face. I designed the poster on Adobe Photoshop.
The artist that influenced my movie poster was René Magritte. Magritte was born November 21, 1898, lived in Belgium, and then passed away on August 15, 1967. He contributed to three major art movements: data, modern, and surrealist movements. Magritte appealed to me because of his unique style; he created his signature style by placing ordinary, often mundane objects in unconventional locations. His artworks are highly realistic with elements that serve to heighten the fantastical and sometimes eerie nature. My art reflects a lot of the same themes, and I hope I can evoke mystery and questioning of the imagery. I also used similar objects as Magritte to illustrate the scene in the movie poster.
