Project 2- Designer's Statement

           

Link to Original Assemblage: https://www.tbhtam.com/single-post/2018/01/01/2018

           For Project 2, I selected a personal assemblage of my own making. I run a blog that discusses various aspects of pop culture and the social lives of individuals in the 19 to 28-age range (more heavily weighted on college life). For the new year, I had done a photo shoot over Winter break to mark the redesign of the blog and the new content that it will be showcasing in the following month. I decided to work with bright hues, models that reflected the age group of the audience, and outrageous and fashionable outfits. The setting for all of this had to be out of the box and place the outfits and models “out of context”. College kids dressed in odd high fashion selections in a park seemed to befit the notion of fashion and modernity challenging the outdoors. The goal was to have them sort of utilizing nature for vanity rather than the typical mission of most photo shoots done outdoors that ask the model to become one with nature. The photo shoot process occurred, then a selection process followed. The images chosen were then edited and altered for the blog post creating an assemblage.

            The order of the images, poses, and other stylistic choices create the rhetorical situation for the image. To cater to this assignment’s need for new meaning, I have edited the images in a reverse process and removed and added pictures from the original shoot.  In regards of the blurb placed before the images in the original blog post, which I have linked above, I shortened it to one sentence that was more vague to leave the images open to free interpretation by the audience, and made an eerie statement that could have a variety of meanings to it placed beneath the spread of images (as opposed to the beginning of the spread like in the original). Specifically, using Facetune and Afterlight, I went back into the album I have saved that contains the photos (pulled out a few neglected shots as well) used in the spread and I reduced brightness, saturation, color, and focus. I cropped some of the images to alter meaning (certain props can no longer be seen). A grey-enhancing filter had been placed over the images along with a feature that creates shadows around the perimeter of the photos. The pictures are almost unrecognizable to their original forms and no longer present an “out with the old and in with the hues” persona.

            The images are now eerie and haunting as the backgrounds of them depict darkness encroaching on the models. Instead of having high fashion trying to fit in with nature competitively, the new spread depicts a fear of nature and displacement.

            Beyond the purposes of this assignment, I believe that the new rendition of the spread can be used in the future (mid-Summer) to show that the blog is versatile and can represent fashion and current trends as well as defy the norms and standards the industry has set. More so, it allows the blog to elaborate on its heavy advocacy for creativity, change, youth, and thinking outside of the box. The audience can expand now to those who have more serious visions of art, that are less fanciful and focused on vibrancy that they may have viewed to be childish—perhaps even allowing them to establish a new appreciation for vibrancy in artwork. The final configuration is a blog advertisement which combines the newly edited images in one graphic. The image has an overlay that resembles a bullseye to put further emphasis on the idea that nature is targeting fashion to an extent. It is supposed to appear stylish with hints at this underlying meaning as it is still a blog advertisement. 

            Ultimately, the assemblage made a transition from bright and bubbly to serious and dark. Athleticism and utilizing of props are now less of a focus. More than anything the new images create a fear making audience members wonder why a person is posing so calmly and stoically in an image that manipulates the surroundings to make it appear that something may be lurking in the background behind the models, as they recognize whatever is behind the model is in fact apart of nature. The distinction is clearer than it was in the previous spread that the two (fashion and nature) are not compatible, only now, the reasoning has changed. Before, an implicit notion had been made that fashion does not understand nature, now there is an essence of fashion not belonging in nature because nature is frightening and fashion is too playful. Another shift I noticed in the final product was that the audience might focus more on the models than their clothes because their clothes are harder to see and their facial expressions are almost as frightening as the edits in the new rendition.