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Elimination Assignment

The purpose of the Elimination Assignment was to take images from different categories and change their meaning. This was done by removing or eliminating something using Photoshop. The categories used for this assignment were: Historical, Fine Art, and Popular Media. The original photos appear on the left, while the edited images using Photoshop are on the right.

Historical:

This first image is known as Fire on Marlborough Street and was taken by Stanley Forman on July 22, 1975. Forman won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography in 1976. In Boston, Massachusetts, a fire engulfed an apartment, causing the residents to flee in panic. The two people included in this photo are a young female child and her mother. Both victims took to the fire escape of their apartment when intense flames threatened their lives. The fire escape collapsed, leaving both of them to fall to the hard concrete. The mother did not survive the fall but braced the fall for her child, who only survived by landing on top of her mother. The original image is difficult to look at. It evokes a lot of emotion, mostly sadness and pain for the two victims. The Photoshopped image I created instantaneously changes the emotion evoked from the original photo. The fear on the young girl’s face is still prevalent, but the image implies that they are falling into the sky, and to me, this means they are both falling together to a higher place.

 

      

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This image is known as KKK; the original image was taken during a riot in Gainesville, Georgia, 1992, by Todd Robertson via Southern Poverty Law Center. The image holds a lot of irony in and of itself. I wanted to push and expand the meaning behind this contradictory image. I thought the image of a white child dressed in a KKK outfit reaching out to two black children would convey an even stronger message of equality, increasing the irony even more. The fact that anyone would dress their child in a KKK outfit astonishes me. I wanted to portray a message that children should not be used to convey something that they cannot fully understand and that racial discrimination is not inherited but learned behavior, something that can, will, and should continue to change.

  

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Popular Media:

This image is a headshot I found on Google. It was taken in 2011 by photographer Max Abadian for Flare Fashion Magazine. In 2014 nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and many other celebrities were leaked from iCloud. I superimposed images of Lawrence herself all over her skin to represent the lack of privacy celebrities, and even non-celebrities are subject to today. We all have the potential of being victims of cyber hacking, leaving us vulnerable and exposing things we may not have wanted anyone else to see.

  

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Fine art:

This next image is a painting called, In Love. I came across it while vacationing in Galveston. I personally met the artist, Michele Grindberg, and visited with her as I toured her gallery. Grindberg explained to me that the fish and the bird represent the love between two different species. I loved the meaning behind the painting and all the things it can potentially represent. I loved the meaning behind the painting and everything it can potentially represent. I realized that removing the fish from the image changed the meaning entirely. Without the fish, there is no longer any representation of love between two beings. The image now seems to capture a lone bird searching for love or scanning the water for prey.

  

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The Nefertiti Bust is a sculpture of an Egyptian royal wife, once married to Akhenaten, an Egyptian Pharaoh. Nefertiti is believed to have ruled for a time after her husband died. Her headdress and jewelry represent her stature and importance. I wanted to strip Nefertiti of these things so that she would appear to be an average person without distinction. In the edited image of Nefertiti, she seems naked and vulnerable but still beautiful. By removing her headdress and jewelry, she becomes like any other peasant during that time; her importance is stripped.

  

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This last image is an extra image I did for fun. I could not resist including it. I love the meaning behind this image. Berndnaut’s lit-up cloud, Nimbus II, seems to be floating lonesome in Mariakape church, located in the Netherlands. Isolated in the church environment, the cloud exudes spirituality and God. Some would say, a visual statement in the debate over faith or lack of faith. When the cloud is removed from the Mariakape church and placed among other clouds you might see every day, it does not stand out. The effect it had on viewers before is now lost. Berndnaut’s Nimbus II cloud looks like any other cloud we would see every day. I have eliminated its importance by removing the cloud from its original setting.

  

Here is my Elimination PDF: Elimination 

All citations from the Elimination project will be listed in the PDF.

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