Love Is...

Artist Statement

This image portrays the living room of my house, with the couch, shelf, and picture frames I wanted to include in the original image while taking it. To gain a sense of memories within an image, I wanted to be sure to include the photos displayed on the wall behind the couch and emphasize their presence when editing. I tried to capture the subjects of the image at an angle where their faces and position were fairly clear while still including key objects in the frame (I struggled not to lose the element of composition while doing so, and kept finding more objects in the background that took away from that focus). Some elements of the background, I edited out altogether for composition purposes and to relate more to the theme of the photo. The placement of everything in the image was by far the factor I struggled with the most when editing and taking the original photograph.

My editing of the photo evolved as I thought more about it. I edited using Adobe Photoshop 2020, a program I am very inexperienced with but am currently playing around with, and discovered different tools and found ways of problem-solving with certain edits I wanted to make. For example, the editing is a little questionable and noticeable with the flower vase on the shelf in the background as well as the flowers in the corner of the image. These were both edited in over other objects that I thought contributed less to the image (in the place of the flower vase was a candle, and for the other flowers, coasters on a nearby table). I had a lot of trouble selecting flowers out of an image and then erasing the rest of the image because when I selected the flowers, it would only let me erase inside that selection. (I tried to click on a few things looking for selecting the outside of the image, but I must have not found it, and I worked around it by myself by using the magnetic selecting tool to get the area around the object).

When I didn't think the color in the image was very exciting, and was simultaneously trying to emphasize the presence of the photographs in the background, I decided to turn the image into a select color portrait by making the blue in the vacation photographs stand out against everything else (helping the composition work out to highlight both the photos and the other, living subjects of the image). I also decided to add a border around my image because I thought it made it stand out more (both on this website and in general).

The meaning behind the image for me is an idea of past and present familial love: the past being the photographs in the background, and the present being one of my family members with my dog, Lucky. In the pictures in the background, my family is interacting and smiling. My family occasionally teases my mother for insisting on so many photos on family vacations and other events, but to me the house wouldn't be the same without the care she put into them (despite not being a photographer). As I am taking a high school photography class myself, I understand the value of preserving these memories through photographs. In the "present" of the image, there is also love, even if it is shown through a simple, everyday situation. I wanted to capture and appreciate the atmosphere of my home with this image because in my life, it is one of the most relevant examples of love. Through taking the time to look at all of the elements compositionally, it made me more aware of them and the possible emotional relevance they have.