For my Photoshop appropriation assignment, I decided to juxtapose an image of Kendall Jenner with a photo of wreckage from the Syrian War.

This is an example of artistic appropriation, as I took these images from other sources, but it also references a much more negative sense of the word: cultural appropriation. Kendall Jenner is notorious for exploiting other cultures with less socio-economic power than her, and offending groups of people through both personal fashion and professional ad campaigns. Recently she starred in a Pepsi commercial that kind of fetishized protest culture, stereotyped race, and made light of the Black Lives Matter movement, police brutality, and other minority rights. It ended with her handing a can of Pepsi to a police officer, and the conflict subsiding because of ‘the magic of Pepsi’ or whatever.

If Pepsi hadn’t faced so much backlash for this commercial, what would they have done next to try to appeal to a politically active target audience? Hence, my grim and disturbingly absurd juxtaposition.

I drew these images from news articles, so I decided to take the NY Times font and collage a sentence that could work either as a news headline or an ad slogan for Pepsi. The words reference Marie Antoinette’s famous quote, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, which essentially means “Let them eat cake”. Antoinette, like most of the French royalty and nobility at the time, was famous for her frivolousness, lavish spendings, and ignorance about the poverty and atrocities going on outside of her bubble. I aimed to compare her to Kendall Jenner and generally critique celebrity culture and unethical advertising in the media.

I used juxtaposition, layering, fragmenting, and decontextualization for this assignment.

The original sources I used are attached below:

https://okmagazine.com/photos/kendall-jenner-kylie-jenner-pac-sun-summer-2015-collection-photos-flaunt-figures/

Part 1:

Part 1 is a realistic self portrait drawn in the mirror. I drew it while I was extremely allergic and sleep deprived, which you can see in both my expression and the way I drew myself. I don’t think this looks like me; in fact, I had a difficult time capturing my likeness. I don’t find it difficult to draw other people realistically, but when it comes to myself, I have a lot of trouble. This portrait does not capture my overall personality by any means. It is a snapshot of a moment in time, a moment as a tired, sick, anxious college student. Drawing myself was a good exercise, because it’s not something I feel confident in, and I plan on practicing this more.

Part 2:

Part 2, the photoshop collage, is the part I am most proud of. I had such a difficult time producing it, yet it is the best quality image in my opinion. After struggling and struggling to figure out how to use Photoshop, I found out that my Adobe programs were improperly installed. I went to IT and they reinstalled them, but when I opened my computer later that day to work on the project, I found that the programs were still not working. I went back to IT another day only to find out that the hours on the website were incorrect and the entire building was closed. It was so frustrating, and I was running out of time. I ended up having to use the Photoshop on my roommates computer, because my computer lacked many of the tools I needed. I used the tools on my roommates computer that I needed and then sent it to my own computer to finish the rest with the tools my computer did offer. The entire process was extremely stressful and frustrating, but I am happy with the outcome.

For this project, I wanted to evoke the imagination and adventure I felt as a child, through a collage of places that I have lived or that had meaningful impacts on me. I chose to weave together minarets in Istanbul with a building in Senegal, and tie the whole thing up in a bouquet of flowers from Switzerland. The pink and purple hues are meant to enhance the dreamlike feeling, along with having the image in the middle the page as if it is floating in the sky.

Part 3:

In retrospect, I wish I drew part 3 with thin black pen rather than pencil. It would have come out more precise and the detail would not be lost in smudge marks. I chose to make it black and white to see how different the image looks with and without color, when compared to part 2. The colored one feels so much more alive and playful, where the black and white one feels more like a lost memory, or an old photo. If I had drawn part 3 in color and black pen it would look kind of like a children’s book, which I think I would prefer looking at.

Overall, I learned a lot about Photoshop, despite it causing an upsetting amount of wasted time with all of the technical problems I experienced. I think each project captures a different aspect of myself from a different time, and together they represent a larger part of me. However, I don’t think they capture me entirely. But can any self portrait really do that?

Through Project 1, I learned about composition, the value of negative space, and how the two work together. Observing negative space can inform the composition of the positive space, and bring out hidden themes you might not have even realized. My project, which represented the ancient Mesopotamian goddess, Ishtar, explored extremes such as love and war, life and death, darkness and light, and more. Putting the positive and negative space versions of my image next to each other evoked these extremes even more powerfully. I payed a lot of attention to detail on the lion emblem and the intricately tangled cord, but if I were to do this project again I would spend more time on the charcoal. I would have made sure it was smooth and even across the page in the negative space drawing, and I would have found a better way for it not to smudge on both drawings. I sprayed them with fixative but it didn’t seem to work. If I had to approach the entire project differently, I think I would have experimented with shadow and light because I think that would give the necklace more life. This time, I used the draping, twisting shape of the cord to do that; to add softness to the stiff charm. Maybe another time I would focus even more on the chord.

Because of this project, I am so much more informed about composition. In the future I will be able to put more thought into where I am placing things and why, because now I have learned a few basics (like how having something coming off the page allows our eyes to be brought in…), and observed many different compositions from my peers. It was also really empowering to put make a project about something that’s meaningful to me.