during my senior year of high school (2017-2018) i took AP 2D: Studio Art for photography; this is my final concentration and commentary:
we are constantly being flooded with ideas from pop culture and social media about how we are supposed to look, dress, and act. these ideas of who we “should be” are also coming from our peers and previous generations. with all of this constantly influencing us, it can be difficult to separate who we really are from who we present ourselves as. my concentration portrays the twelve zodiac signs because we look to astrology for guidance on who we are – even if it is not logical.
when choosing how to dress my subjects, i thought about this: young women are caught in between the conservative ways of the past, where showing shoulders, stomachs, or thighs infers promiscuity and the present where showing more skin is used to get more likes on social media or represent a defiance of the rape culture that our society has become. therefore, the clothing i chose to have the young women wear embodies the feeling of being stuck in between childhood and adulthood: a vulnerability caused by the innocence of youth contradicted with the desire to grow up too fast, which we often demonstrate by showing more skin.
i tried to pose my subjects in a way that would embody the characteristics, the good and the bad, of their sign. i chose to include the “negative” traits of each zodiac sign (vain, detached, emotional, secretive, unforgiving, etc.) in order to convey on the idea that not all of the pieces of yourself will be considered “positive”, but this shouldn't be seen as a bad thing.
as people, we are filled with a countless number of emotions. i am no exception to this. i have felt love, although i am not sure that i have ever been in love; but i have been heartbroken. i believe that people glorify the love and happiness of life and ignore the sadness, but there is so much beauty in pain and in heartbreak; it should be acknowledged. my goal for this project was to do this: show the beauty in sadness. using my own writings about experiences i’ve had and various types of mixed media, including pressed flowers, cellophane, gold leaf, and egg yolk, i transformed a collection of my photographs into a story of love fading into hate.
