Abstraction

Artist Statement

I was unsure where I wanted to go with this project when I started it—I wandered around my house taking photos of anything that looked interesting, trying to capture details of the subject by placing the camera close to it. I didn’t find any photo I particularly liked, so I decided to try a different approach. Knowing I wanted another photo to connect to my personal concentration, I decided to start by choosing a literary/rhetorical device to portray and stick with it. I stumbled across anacoluthon, where there is a discontinuity in the portrayal of ideas in a single sentence (often resembling switching your train of thought mid-sentence), and thought that it would be a good fit for abstract photography. I knew I wanted there to be multiple ideas, scenes, moods, and colors in one image. Noticing a picture frame on the wall near my desk, I decided I would start with a photo where I centered that and then edit in other images to replace the ones actually inside. While gathering the images for my photo montage, I looked through my phone’s camera roll, finding photos of different settings taken throughout this year—a highway, a sunset, a puddle on a rainy day—and sent them all to my laptop.

I knew what I wanted to do for my first step of photo editing, which was to fit the different images into the picture frame. Using the picture frame as the background layer, I made six layers over it and placed a different image on each layer, resizing them and moving them to fit mostly in the specific space they had. Going onto each individual layer, I selected the image with either the circle or rectangle selection tool, changed the selection setting to inverse, and erased the edges of the photos that didn’t fit within the picture frame. After that, I used the burn tool at a low opacity along the edges of each image and in the background layer along the edge of the picture frame surrounding each image. Going into the layer settings, I then flattened the image, allowing all of my edits so far to fit on one layer. Opening the filter gallery, I applied the glass filter (lowering the distortion on the ‘canvas’ setting) and the film grain filter (lowering the grain and intensity) to the image. From here, I wasn’t sure how to make the photo more interesting. Because the composition of the image wasn’t particularly complex, I wanted to apply an effect that would make the image stand out while making it more abstract. I played around with this: I exported the image out of photoshop and then placed it back into the document on another layer. I made it the exact same size as the other image and then positioned it slightly to the right and up. Placing the image, I then reduced the opacity of the layer to 30%, which made the layer look like it was echoing the background layer. Finally, I moved the image into Photos and slightly reduced the exposure, increased the highlights, and increased the contrast. I also brought up the saturation.

The image is meant to represent a lot of different unrelated/inconsistent ideas, moods, and settings in one place, which I tried to accomplish by choosing different images. It connects to anacoluthon, which can sometimes be confusing and seem grammatically incorrect. Because of this, I hoped a more abstract image would better represent it by making some of my editing choices more unclear and putting very different images in one place. Considering I struggled with finding inspiration at the start of this project despite looking at many examples, I’m happy with the final product.