Portrait Assignment

Conceptual Statement

My project was somewhat inspired by Paul Smith's work from the read- ing. He used his concept of Projected Self to make a himself appear courageous, even though his true self was not. Feeling he was too big a coward to do things like jump from building to building, or parachute from an airplane, he found he could live those fantasies by digitally placing himself into these scenarios.

I found this approach to be very vain and childish. My friends and I bas- ically learned Photoshop having done the same thing for our Myspace pages for years now (example: The Artist as Snoop Dogg, 2003). Perhaps Smith had more courage than he thinks, if has the audacity to call that art.

My project intends to be a statement on the idea of the struggling art- ist. I have happily waited tables for the last 6 years to support a life of music and art. While I may not be able to afford all the things I would like, I keep food in my refrigerator, and enough in my bank account to go on the occasional vacation and splurge on my girlfriend every now and then. Life is good, even if I've never gone sky-diving, or held a sub- machine gun.

I realize how lucky I am. I also realize how bad some people have it. So for my Projected Self Portraits I took photographs of me enjoying my life (some were taken explicitly for the project, while others are of vac- ations, long bike rides, and parties), and superimposed them into scen- arios of true misfortune. The more heartbreaking and brutal, the better. I wanted the photos to make me look stupid, spoiled and arrogant by comparison. My goal is to make myself as well as the viewer not just feel thankful, but almost guilty for everything they are fortunate enough to have. Because when it all boils down to it, dumb luck is all we really have going for us.



















Photo credits: Getty Images, AP photo, Rafiq Maqbool, Dorthea Lange, Word of Photos, and Reuters.

Technical/Formal Points

Each photo was done pretty much the same way. First I would cut a picture of my face using the selection tool. Next I would resize it using the Auto-select and the Free Transform options. Step three was to mask out any part of my face that didn't belong in the composition, occas- ionally using a different flows and opacities to blend towards the back- ground photograph. The final, and most time-consuming task was to match the color, focus and photo quality of the original photograph. This was accomplished with mainly level and curve adjustments to match the values, and Filters to match focus and photo grain.

Once I did had the images looking proper, I changed the resolution to 300 DPI. A few more filters (Unsharp Mask and, Dust and Scratches did the trick) to add pop and lose some of the jpeg artifacts grom the dark- er tones, and the images are set for print! I was able to finish all but two of the pieces in class. One unfinished piece was black and white, and the other was a color image. The hurricane picture that I worked on at home tells you how important color profiles are, because although it looked absolutely perfect on my computer at home, looking at it here on these Mac monitors it looks undoubtedly Photoshopped.