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- Past In this picture, a lady is wrapped up by big brand clothes and looks rich. However, she is in the public laundry room washing her clothes. It is not only clothes but also poverty that the lady pulls out from the machine. This avatar represents the past when I pay most of my attention packaging myself, looking for vanity. I used to care a lot about what do I look like, instead of exploring who I am inside.
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- Present The picture is about a manipulated female with knife in her hand trying to commit suicide. There are strings connected to different parts of her body. This avatar represents the my present. I find drawbacks in myself and kill them in order to improve and become a better self. It is the dissatisfaction of staying in the present. The particular one represents I am killing the old myself who enjoy being manipulated and don’t know to fight for herself.
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- Future The picture is a girl who love Japanese ghost culture and decorate herself with cool elements from that culture, so people consider she has creepy hobby. However, having some creepy hobbies doesn’t mean that somebody can’t have some normal hobby. In the case, the girl also enjoying cooking. This avatar shows the future. I wish I could become a cool girl that can expire myself through all the things I loved, no matter whether they are appreciated.In that way I could achieve my uniqueness.
In this project, I want to show the similarity among people. I use a lot of symbolism to set up individual stories for each photo. And then seek similarities between the photos and my life.
The second photo which represents the present was retaken last week to make an improvement. Before, it is a woman holding a shard knife and aiming something out of the sight. There are piles of skulls between her legs. But the audience felt confused and couldn’t see the story that I want to tell and their attention were drawn out of the sight, so I changed it to the one above, changing the position, adding lights and some strings connected to the girl’s body so it is clear that the girl was manipulated. I also deleted some extra symbols (extra price tags) in the past photo and changed the tattoo on the face and the whole light in the future photo to make them more reasonable and close to the theme.
What I learned from this project is that critique is very important and helpful. It helped me to find details that I was likely to ignore, and helped me to think not only in the creator’s view but also the audience’s view.
What was most successful about my project was that people like the idea about showing individual story in each photo and then finding the similarities between the photos and me. People like these individual stories because they are all kind of connected to the human nature, so they feel familiar to these scenes which are so dramatic at the first look.
The challenge I had was expressing the individual stories clearly as well as connecting the photos with my own experience and feelings. It was challenging because there are too many information to contain and I wanted my photos to have strong expressions and are easy to understand. But I soon found out that if I could connect the photos with human nature which shared by both the creator and the audience, it will be so powerful. The human nature in the past, present and future photos are seeking vanity, having dissatisfaction about the present and wanting to be unique.
If I did this project again, I would pay more attention on research and the background so that I could create more interesting avatar photos.
