Glass/Transparency

Artist Statement

For this project we had the task of taking a photo through a certain piece of glass, or have an image appear as transparent. My subject for this image is my friend Johnny. I took this photo in the morning right before school to start in the student parking lot. I took this image by using a portrait filter/mode on my phone. I also used my car window with a little bit of melted ice that turned into water streams on my window. I decided to create this image because it followed my inquiry question. I also tried to focus on the colors of this image, by brightening the red of his shirt as well as the colors in the background so that it would provide a higher level of contrast. I also tried to focus on getting the rain streaks in the picture because I think it showed that there was a window there and added a little bit more texture to the image that I thought looked good.

For this image I used the compositional techniques of selective focus as well as formal balance. For the selective focus you can see all around Johnny that it is blurred out. I did that because I wanted to focus on the water as well as just having a crisp clean face in the photo. I also used formal balance. You can see that if you were to split the entire image in half you would have almost identical looking half. This naturally happened when trying to focus on getting a picture of his face. My project first started as me thinking that I would take a photo of my dog through my dog through my dining room window but he would not sit still long enough for me to do that, so In the morning before school, I asked johnny if he could stand outside my window and let me take a picture of him. I made sure to get a little more water on the window then there already was by pouring water from my water bottle onto the window.

The meaning behind this image is that going into school is a very rough thing to do in the morning, and you can see how fake his smile is on his face, and I think that is a little funny because he was not excited to walk into school that morning. This relates to my life because I feel the same exact way as him but I wanted to be able to express that with someone else and he did the perfect job because he is the one to have no filter and says what he means. The biggest thing I would change about the image is to get closer, because originally I took the photo from farther away, and I eventually cropped it and it went down in resolution.

-Matthew Kempf.