“Retrospect & Ongoing” - Portfolio showing the evolution of Indonesian teenagers.

Figuring out a topic to tackle for my Personal Project was pretty easy. I have loved taking photographs since I was a young age. This passion for photography has developed throughout my journey of traveling to places with my family. With the pandemic hitting all of us, borders closed which means that I could not travel and take photographs. I still continued this passion of mine with the help of my mom as an actress, where she would have lots of photoshoots. In the meantime, I’ve been her photographer and helped her take her pictures at home for her work. I have always believed that taking photographs makes your future easier to go back to the old times and reminisce the memories. That's why I would never miss a moment without capturing it; no matter how good or bad it’ll turn out, I believe that each picture represents an event that we can go back to later. As we grow older, we create more memories and by the age of 60, looking back at the pictures of our teen years, we might not even remember the whole event of a picture but at least we still have that picture that reminds us of how the good times were back in the days. Not just taking photographs, but designing has been a part of my life ever since grade 6. When I was introduced to this subject in school, I loved it and always tried my best to put in the best work. Throughout the years up until now, I have continued to improve and get new inspirations from different platforms and people for designing such things. Designing has really allowed me to express and explore different ideas and make them into a piece of work. I believe that with these two passions that I have got, I could use my skills and explore them more by creating something useful with it. I believe that these 2 skills can make a greater impact and produce a pleasing outcome. With all of that, I have decided to combine both of these and have my learning goal for this Personal Project, which is to explore both photography and design in a greater depth.

Product Goal

Through this learning goal, I would like to create something that is interesting and unique and something that could also help me improve these skills of mine. I would be combining these two passions into a Product Goal to show the evolution of Indonesian teenagers in a portfolio, capturing the moments of Indonesian teenagers these days as well as recapturing the moments taken back in the old ways to reminisce the moments and view their difference through the art of photography. Through my portfolio, I’ll be using my designing skills to compare the two generations, specifically tackling my mothers and I, which would start from 1990 until 2021.

Reflection

Every single step in the journey of creating my product was very meaningful and had an impact on my own personal learnings. People always say that you should research first before everything. Yes, I do believe so, but I actually found it more effective when I had to research while actually starting working on my final product. I believe that you learn through your errors and mistakes, through different trials as it helps you more rather than just a simple old traditional research. Through different trials of photographs that I started doing at home, practice capturing some moments that I can find around my family, I was able to experiment with the knowledge that I have gotten by implementing the techniques that I have gathered and learned from my research. During the photoshoot that I had, I still had to play around with the different lighting and settings on the camera, as well as the lightbox (godox) that was provided by the studio, and played around with the different angles. With all of this learning and experience that I have gotten, it is now implemented in my brain and would be very useful for future purposes. I have now improved a skill that I already had back then with only a little knowledge. Especially this style of photography that I used for my final product, I was always interested to try on this style and from this experience, I have gotten the chance to actually explore and try it out. It was something new to me, I’ve seen this style all around the world of photography. I've thought of it as a way to express one’s feelings since it really captures every detail of an expression.

In creating the template of my final product which is the portfolio, I had to go through different drafts in order to get to the final one that I like. Through this process that I went through, I have learned that it isn't that easy to create a design that matches my own liking. I have understood that too much or too little of something can drastically change a design and one liking for it. By actually trying to create a design for my portfolio, it helped me further understand the knowledge that I have gotten from the interview that I had. It put all of my understanding onto a piece of paper, bringing it to life.

Product Evaluation

My end product for this Personal Project is a portfolio covering the evolution of the Indonesian teenage life around the two generations, my generation (the year 2020) and my parents (1990’s). I decided to name my portfolio, Retrospect & Ongoing. There is indeed a meaning behind this title that I have come up with for my final product as my portfolio delivers a collection of portraits along with its brief description and followed by some quotations that were taken from previous surveys and/or interviews, both of the words Retrospect and Ongoing somewhat represents what is being reflected in my portfolio, which is the past and the present. Retrospect & Ongoing focus to capture and shows all teens out there, the major differences in one's teenage life compared to their parents back in the days. The portfolio comprises six distinct concepts/themes, starting off with relationships, moving on to social life, protests, speaking, fashion, and finally sex education. Starting off with the first theme, this one really captures the differences in how we go on dates and how dating was like in the ’90s compared to 2020. It is shown how the act of affection for one another was shown more through the quality time that they have valued rather than physical affection which is a more common occurrence in today's society. The next theme captures the fun in both generations, but it is indeed differentiated by the different approaches. With the third theme, the images have shown and it is seen very clearly its major differences in the way teenagers protest. The fourth theme covers one's way of speaking, how it is very well influenced by the culture in the society right now but back in the ’90s, everything was all about respect. The following theme would be one of my favorites, it captures the fashion with the 360° change on how teens prefer to look. Now last but not least, scopes on the major differences when it comes to accessibility, one with the lack of sex education and the other one with too much freedom. For the style of the photography that I have implemented in this final end portfolio which is portrait photography, this choice of style was purely inspired by my surroundings. I often see these styles so, therefore, I decided to implement all of the knowledge and learnings that I have gotten through my learning goal part to bring it to life.