Portrait

Artist Statement

Before taking these photos, I looked up a few resources giving advice on how to get inspiration for and how to shoot portraits. One of them suggested taking a photo through something, and the other described how to create a rainbow effect with a CD and a flashlight, so I settled on trying those two. First, I tried taking a photo through a cabinet window. I wanted to capture my face as well as the bracelet on my hand, so using my other hand to hold my phone camera and take the photo was a challenge (I didn’t have anyone else available to hold it at the time), and I couldn’t change the camera angle as easily. However, I eventually settled on something I was content with, and saved most work for photo editing later on. With the second image, I wanted to eliminate most of the photo editing I would have to do later on. Propping the CD and the flashlight on various objects I had lying around, I turned off all of the lights in my room and angled the rainbow to appear on my wall. I then sat down on the floor and put my hand near the rainbow, again showing the bracelet (I wanted the bracelet to be a repeating item through both images). I moved the phone camera around, taking bursts of photos, then selected the best one visually.

The only photo edits I made on my second image, the one of my hand and the rainbow, was importing the image into the photos application and using the select color feature to increase the saturation of red, yellow, blue, and purple. I also decreased the exposure slightly. For my first image, I had a little more work to do—I wanted both the bracelet and the rainbow effect to be repeated throughout both images, but the first original image didn’t already have the rainbow effect present. I decided I wanted to edit it in through the windows and blur out my face a little as well. I created two layers in photoshop, both of the exact same image overlapped. On the first layer, I added a variety of filters—watercolor, film grain, spatter, ocean ripple, and glass—to distort the image. Then, moving to the layer on top of that, I erased the area inside of the windows to reveal the edited image beneath, and used the blur tool to try and smooth out the edges of the cabinet. Also on the second layer, I used the brush tool in the color setting at a very low opacity to paint over everything outside of or over the window in a shade of teal. Moving back to the first layer, I selected the part of the image inside the windows with the select tool. I used the gradient tool on the color setting, selecting an iridescent rainbow effect gradient from the menu, to create a rainbow effect when looking through the windows at the more blurry and distorted image. Finally, I converted the image to a JPEG and in the photos application made similar edits as I had with my first image to emphasize the colors—increased saturation for red, yellow, blue, and purple (I left out green both times because of the color of my sweatshirt).

The reason I wanted at least two repeating elements in the diptych was to relate to my concentration of representing literary/rhetorical devices through photography. I wanted to think outside of devices that were easier to represent visually and I had already used in my project (metaphor, symbolism, etc) and to find some creative ways to approach new ones. Anaphora is the repetition of something, like a word or phrase, at the beginning of multiple clauses, and an epistrophe is when it repeats at the end. By adding repeating elements into both of my photos, I would be able to represent both in my final image(s). The repeating elements I chose were the rainbows in both images, and the bracelet I’m wearing in both images.