Foreign Skin
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For my series of photos, I chose to demonstrate the struggles and distorted images of one’s body and appearance. To portray this, I used many abstract concepts and controversial items to make the viewer question how they see beauty and what they do in their lives to achieve this unrealistic goal: putting on makeup to hide insecurity, plastic surgery, starving themselves, and constantly referring to society’s “perfect” image. A few images that I took display a certain focus and portrait-like layout in which I used higher apertures for focus; 6.3, 7.1, and 8. Having it on face value helps to show the focus and keep the photo simple; without too much texture, background, or depth. The other photos, however, I used a low aperture around 4.0 to 5.6 in order to achieve different perspectives and depths which blur out the background and keep the focused subject sharp while still having the effect of the soft background noise. On a critical note, some of the photos have lighting that are either a bit too dark or too light. The compositions for the most part keep the focus, but the angles could be adjusted to make the photos more uniform; some of the angles make the composition “awkward” and lopsided. For the most part in terms of subject matter, the photos did display a controversial setting that conveyed an unsettling feeling about common practices for our body images like plastic surgery. Some photos, however, could have been edited to portray the message better since some are a bit unclear. For example the yellow paint covering the purple on the person’s hand was represents how we cover up our true selves with light aesthetic objects in order to achieve a better self-esteem; society is more about hiding yourself to feel better rather than enhancing your own natural beauty. However, the paint simply being painted over the purple hand gets across the objective of wanting to hide ourselves with a vibrant front, but it does not fully show the “covering up to boost self-esteem” aspect and does not fully give the viewer a sense of shame in wanting to hide themselves.
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