Minimalism

Artist Statement

For this image I wanted to spend some time outside, because I thought that the sky could be a good use of negative space in the image. While on a walk around my neighborhood, I ended up with a few images that emphasized minimalism—however, on their own they weren’t very interesting. Many of them featured power lines and trees, with a bright blue sky in the background. I tried to keep composition in mind while capturing the unedited images, using a low horizon in the images featuring the trees in order to capture a lot of the empty sky above them and allowing the power lines in the other images to take up most of the space in the image while still clearly showing the sky. Looking at the images I had, I decided they would be more interesting if I combined the two while still leaving a lot of space for the background.

For photo editing, the hardest part was editing in the second image over the first background layer of the trees against the sky. Because the subject was stretched out over the image but thin, erasing the background in the layer but keeping the power lines took some time and detail depending on how much was selected. So that the background color would be more uniform, rather than keeping some of the sky shown in the image I placed over the background layer I erased it. Once the two photos were blended together, I used the burn tool to make the trees a little darker. This was because when I moved the image into Photos later on, I wanted to increase the shadows/black point to make them more silhouette-like. For the rest of the background later, I used the dodge tool on a low opacity over the sky to make it a little lighter. I also used the burn tool behind the power lines to give them a bit of shadow. I used the dodge tool to highlight parts of the sky most affected by the sunlight. Finally, using the paintbrush tool on the color setting, I changed the sky to a more green/teal hue than blue, because I thought the brighter color made it more interesting. Moving the image into Photos, I increased the black point, shadows, highlights, and brilliance. I decreased the exposure and brightness. Originally, I wanted to crop the image to include less of the trees, but I decided against it because it didn’t strengthen the composition of the low horizon like I thought it would. I considered putting the image in black and white as well to emphasize the silhouette aspect of it, but thought that the bright color of the background made the image stand out more.

How this photo relates to my personal concentration of representing literary and rhetorical devices through photography is through the empty space (the sky as the background) I included throughout the image. Asyndeton is when in a sentence the writer intentionally leaves out conjunctions to emphasize its meaning instead. The empty space throughout the photo highlights when a subject is shown against the empty background, with nothing that transitions from the silhouette into the bright blue sky. By using minimalism, I thought the photo could be a good fit for a literary device that involves the absence of something. It makes the subjects of the photo stand out.