Yearning Youth

Fading

Pure

My main intent for this photoshoot was to capture the changes through a lifetime/generation and how time affects someone throughout their life.

In the photograph “Pure,” you can see the girl with soft, pure skin smiling. There is so little age on her face, only the overflowing joyous memories etched into her face, visible by the faint lines near her smile and the slight wrinkle under her eyes from smiling so much. Almost all of her hair is bright, showing the youth flowing through her; only a tiny bit of darker hair is bleeding into the light hair, showing the age coming.

As the girl ages and moves on in her life, the darker hair begins to bleed through even further. This is shown in the photo “Fading.” As the girl gets older, her hair turns darker, and she learns more about the hardships in life. Her smile is barely visible anymore, and her eyes aren’t shimmering with joy and excitement as they once were. Her cheeks are now more hollow as her youth begins to fade away. There is now a heaviness in her eyes and weight in her face as she gazes away.

In the final photo, “Yearning Youth,” the woman’s hair is entirely dark, showing that she has made it through her youth. She is no longer a child or a girl. She is now a woman. You can see the creases on her face from years and years of sadness, happiness, and anger; all of the emotions have been alive in her features; however, the emotion that is now shown is yearning. Yearning for the youth back. Yearning for the happiness back. Yearning for the full cheeks back. Her hair is now thin and frail, running out of health and liveliness. Her face is now more hollow and bony, showing the life slowly brushing away her body over the years. Looking back at the young girl she once was, so full of life and happiness, she feels pained that she is no longer like that girl.

These three photos were taken by the inspiration of the photographer Dorothea Lange. More specifically, her photos of the “Migrant Mother”. In these photos, the mother is looking off into the distance as children are tightly nestled against her sides. I liked how Lange took the photos with the mother looking into the distance because you can clearly see that she has millions of thoughts going through her head and they are all written in her eyes and facial expression.

In the photos of the young girl, she has makeup on to enhance her beauty and show off the emotions that swim in her eyes. The makeup and roots of her hair draw your eyes to her eyes. Entrapping your vision in the picture to analyze all of her emotions. In the photos of the woman, your eyes are immediately drawn to her dark hair which hints at the overall intent of the photo. Her hair is free and wavy. Careless. It looks as if she tends to it as she would a delicate child; however, she lets her true self show through keeping the hair down and open.

Forgotten Smiles

Obscure Light

Confined Shadow

Blooming Darkness

All these photos convey the emotion of vulnerability. When you first look at the photos, you’re drawn to her eyes. The eyes show stories. Stories of struggle, of hurt, of betrayal. Of vulnerability. My intention for these photographs was to capture the viewer’s eyes and feelings through the raw vulnerability in these photos. To enhance the creases on her face, I took the photos close up instead of showing more background space. This forces the viewer to look at the model and her emotions and facial features rather than the background.

Presentation: From left to right: Obscure Light, Forgotten Smiles, Confined Shadow, Blooming Darkness. I chose this order because it shows the acceptance of being in the darkness and vulnerability. The expressions go from little hope of safety and happiness (Obscure Light) to the realization of being trapped in their own mind and exposing what they feel to people who shouldn’t know (Blooming Darkness). In between (Forgotten Smiles and Confined Shadow), she goes through the happy memories that are now forgotten and in the past. The feeling she was once so familiar with was now lost in the darkness and blur of the shadows that now covered it all up. She is stuck within herself. Within her mind. She now lives within the shadows of her mind and body, no longer in herself and her heart.

These photos link to my inspiration because they show the stories through the eyes. You can see the emotion swirling throughout the iris even though it isn’t colored. The black and white show the lack of emotion and the lost positivity. In Kadar’s photographs, his stories and memories are shown through his facial expressions and eyes. In this set of photographs, I decided to focus more on the emotion in the eyes.

Photoshoot 1

Improvements:

• Background: I want a plain background so that the viewer can focus solely on the figure and their facial emotion and detail.
• Eyes: I want the model’s eyes to look away from the photo and appear thoughtful and sad.
• Lighting: I enjoyed using the light to showcase half of the model’s face or only a part of it. I want to stop using full lighting to enlighten the person’s face because I want the overall color to be dark and sad.
• Emotion: For some of these photos, the model is resting their face. I want there to be a slight frown on their face to convey the message of sadness and vulnerability.

I chose this photo as my favorite because the person has a detailed facial expression. You can see all the creases on her face, along with the fear and sadness that are portrayed. Kandar said that this photo is of a lady who survived the Holocaust as a Jew. Based on her facial expression, the tears, and the hand placement, we can see that she was clearly scared of something and saddened by it, too. The hand placement shows a shock as if she just lost her breath because of something she had gone through or witnessed. Her facial expression and tears show that she’s looking back at something that happened (the Holocaust) and how she feels about it. The background and colors show that what she is looking back on isn’t anything good, the overall feeling is dull and sad.

I chose the photographer Nadav Kander. From my chosen photographs, Kander intends to portray fear or sadness through people’s facial expressions. In these photos, I realized that much of the emotion he captures isn’t only through the eyes and the eyebrows. The way the eyebrows are angled in the photos shows a different emotion. Kandar seems to like the straight-ahead angle when taking photos. Sometimes, he tilts the person to get a different face profile; however, in all the photos I chose, he took the pictures straight ahead.

The topic of my photographs will revolve around the emotions of vulnerability, fear, and fragility. I want my photos to show the darkness people feel at times and how they feel trapped in it. They can’t see anything but the darkness that is consuming them. I want my audience to feel light and helpless. In colorful pictures, your eyes are looking everywhere at once and without knowing, it could become overwhelming when you feel the need to see everything. However, when they look at my photos they only need to focus on one point, nothing more. I will get inspiration and develop my ideas by looking for photographs that include people who portray fear on their faces. When someone feels vulnerable, they fear that they will get hurt. For some photos I want to cover the eyes with cloth so that the only fear visible is on the bottom half of their face. I want this because people often see fear through someone’s eyes, I want to try and capture fear in new places.

The social issue concept I want to explore with my photographs is the mixed feeling of fear and vulnerability, which is fragility. The photographer I found who captures these feelings is Nadav Kander.

In his photographs, you can see the genuine emotion etched onto the individual’s face, whether fear, vulnerability, or shock. 

I think that photographs can be made into portraits when the photographer captures all of the details of an individual. They must use the creases in the face, the intense color of the eyes, and the individual’s emotion. Depending on the angle you take your photos, the quality will change. For example, if you take a selfie, the quality of the photo will be different from the portraits taken by others. If someone is taking a photo of an individual, it is easier for them to find the right angle and focus for the photo to be good quality.

When taking a portrait photograph, you don’t want to include so much background because the focus is on the person in the photo. You want to focus more on the person’s traits and emotions than the background details. Finding the proper focus for this photograph will affect your picture quality. An out-of-focus or a far-away photo won’t emphasize the individual’s appearance.

A ‘good portrait’ should include a clear view of the person up close so that their facial features are visible. A good view of the iris will make the photo look much better. Especially if they stand out in the photo. To help the eyes stand out in the photo, you can center them so that when people look at the photo, their eyes are immediately drawn to the pop of color in the center of the photo.

No matter how small the detail in a portrait, as long as you capture all the creases and shapes, it could be a good portrait. Placement is essential if you include more body parts in your photo. However, the more blur or background you have in a portrait photo, the more abstract it will look. Not including the person at all can’t be considered a portrait. Portrait photographs show an individual’s appearance and emotion, not their living style or something that might represent them.

Portrait photographs don’t have to be a single photo. You could take multiple photos of the same person and make one big photo out of all the individual ones. To achieve this type of photograph, you must keep every aspect in each photo the same.

I chose these 30 because they all relate to architecture, curved lines, shadows, and patterns. I wanted to focus more on different angles for architecture.

I chose these 10 because, for the architectural photos, I liked how they all are from different angles so that they can be viewed in new and different ways. If you find an angle that makes the building tower over you, like it’s radiating intensity or power. However, when you see an angle of a distant building, there is open space, and the building is a sudden presence in the photo, clashing with the blank space of the sky. For the pattern/repetition photos, I wanted people to look at the photos and feel trapped within the patterns like a maze. For so many teenagers, children, or even adults, people sometimes feel lost in the world. Like they are taking the wrong path in life. Finding your path in life requires dead ends and difficult choices; your path won’t always be straight and easy; it could be curvy, zig-zag, bumpy, all over the place, anything but straight and easy. Not only do the patterns bring out the trapped feeling, but the black and white do, too. Colorful pictures add so much life and happiness to them that it seems people only look at the good moments and happy feelings. However, to get those good and happy feelings, you must go through life’s troubles and dark parts. The struggles. I want people to experience a rush of emotion when they look at my photos. I want them to notice that not all things come easily, and although there are troubles, there will be happiness.

I chose these as my top 3 because my goal for this photoshoot was to take pictures of architecture from different angles. In the first photo, I wanted to capture the height of the building, and I wanted people to feel the intensity of the large building. If you look at the top right and bottom left corners, you can see that there are objects that lead your eyes towards the center of the photo. I want people to look at this photo and feel determined to move forward even if things are in their way. It may be intimidating and challenging. But to get through hard times, you must keep moving forward and not look behind until you achieve your goal. For the second photo I wanted to get a balance between the sky and the building. I chose a long view because I wanted people to get the feeling that they’re looking into the future at all the memories that they will have to cherish for the rest of their lives. The windows represent the memories of the present and future that are stored away in these rooms. The branches and trees add warmth and presence to the photo. Instead of open and empty sky, there are branches reaching towards the sky and building as a support and makes the loneliness of the photo disappear with their presence. For the final photo, I decided to have a lot of extra space for the sky and one long pole looking building. If you look close enough, you will be able to see a ladder leading to the top of the building. I only realized this small detail when I was choosing my top 3 photos. I think that the ladder adds so much to the photo. Although climbing this ladder wouldn’t be easy, it would be worth it. You can see in the photo that there is a gradient from the top to bottom getting lighter as you look up the photo. The higher you climb the ladder, the better the view of the world around you and the progress you have made going up the ladder. I view the ladder as a life. You’re only going up in life and as you live on, things can become more difficult and become tiring however, nobody ever stops trying until their last breath. Until they reach the end of their ladder and near the light part of the photo. At the top of everyone’s ladder, they can clearly see all the progress they’ve made, all the accomplishments they’ve had, all the memories they’ve made, everything. These 3 photos all represent determination and persitance. Every memory is worth it in the end no matter how dark.