There are three types of pictures in my selfie grid —- low contrast & exposure, high saturation & standard exposure, and black & white with full exposure and contrast. These three types of image levels symbolize the progress of me growing up, from what was said to be “undecided of what I want to do” with lots of other distractions (colors) happening that kept me curious about different aspects of life, to what my parents said was “maturity” or “know what my life goal is”. The black and white photos stand for the stage I am in right now – in which I avoid any irrelevant experience that digresses from my goal – the stage of “I think I know where and what I want to be in future”. However, I found I lost so many things, whether it’s time with my friends, my families, or the braveness to get involved in new things even if I would fail.
To be honest, no one can really be sure where they are in future, and the process of getting rid of all the other possibilities, thinking they know this will help them identify a pathway to maturity only results in the lost of one’s true self. Therefore, my selfie grid also shows a disappearing orbital shape from the black and white photos to the plain paper. The angling of the black and white photos was a big challenge for me in the making process, as I worked with multiple placements of photos to achieve the best orbit. The cropping of photos was also difficult, as I need certain parts of face remain in the images but also be able to form an visually orbital shape. The square outline surrounding the colorful photos signifies “my own little world” as a child, which was a phrase adults around me always used to describe my actions when I got my attention attracted to so many other things and did not respond back to their call.
I was deciding whether to keep the outline for the final piece and had both versions exported for comparison. However, I found interestingly that the bracket also constraints viewers attention to the black center in the middle, where it looks like I got part of my face not shown, so I decided to keep the black outline as the final version. In terms of the black center at the middle, it expresses my idea that no one can see their own face. All our actions that we are aware of are choices and decisions made by our mind consciously, and thus there is a reason for that, hence not real or natural. The only time when we are truly real is when we are not consciously aware of where we are or what we are doing, which is definitely something we cannot see by ourselves.
