Friendship

Artist Statement

My thought process for this image was all over the place, because friendship during the pandemic looks very different than it had previously. Before, I saw my friends at school, outside of school, everywhere. Even if I felt like I hadn’t interacted with them a lot, I would always see them in hallways or at lunch or that weekend. Now, technology is the only way I’ve connected with them for quite some time now. I thought that would be pretty boring to portray in an image, just a person sitting down on their phone on FaceTime or iMessage—but I also knew that was the reality of my experience, so I thought my photojournalism image should accurately reflect that. One thing I didn’t like about the image was that it seemed a little posed. This was because I was photographing myself as the subject and did so by setting a timer on another device of mine. Although I was contacting a friend at the time I took the photo, I regret not capturing the image more creatively.

As for photo editing, I used a similar routine as I have with my previous images—in Photoshop, I tried to keep the large edits to a minimum to preserve the accuracy of the image. I didn’t use the spot healing tool in this image because I didn’t find it necessary, but I did apply two filters—diffuse glow and film grain. I reduced the intensity of both. The diffuse glow emphasized the highlights of the image, and the film grain was mostly an attempt to conceal the bad quality of the original image, which I tried to fix in various ways and partially succeeded in. My most noticeable decision was to use the rectangular select tool and brush tool on 50% opacity to add the border to the image, which I thought added another element to the image and make the composition more interesting to look at without changing the reality of the image. In Photos, I increased the cast, as well as used the select color feature to increase the saturation slightly of yellow and red. I reduced the saturation of the lighter blues in the image so that the photos on the wall in the background wouldn’t be too distracting. Overall, there wasn’t a lot of noticeable color in the image, and I didn’t believe it added to it too much, so I made a last-minute decision to put the image in black and white.

The meaning behind the image evolved after I acknowledged that I couldn’t think of a very creative way to portray how I managed friendships during the pandemic. It involves a lot of connecting through technology, usually my phone. The photo doesn’t look like it portrays friendship on its surface—it shows a teenage girl sitting on her couch on her phone—but I believe a lot of us at home during the pandemic are feeling a lot of loneliness with not being able to see many people outside of a computer screen. The empty room that surrounds the subject in the image and the lack of bright colors ended up reflecting that, and although I’m effectively staying connected with my friends during this time, the image ended up reflecting more of the elements of “normal” life that are now missing.