Perspective Task - Image One
This piece is inspired by a secondary source of Lee Jeffries’ portraits of the homeless, and the upfront bold visuals of Barbara Kruger’s work (see research post).
I wanted to convey the loss of identity the homeless have when living on the streets; to the public, they are just homeless people rather than individuals themselves. I started to think about how I could show this through graphic design as well as touching upon Perspective.
Whilst researching portraits for the Tall and Narrow task prior to this, I found the works of photographer Lee Jeffries to be very effective; the bold use of black and white with high contrast is like a sucker-punch; on first glance it’s just a portrait but when you really look, the colours hit you and exceeds your first expectations and pretence of the photograph.
I chose this piece from Time magazine by Lee, as the subject is kind of unkempt and their nails are long, a hyper-exaggerated version of the homeless in my opinion. Similarly to my first tall and narrow outcome where I blacked out the faces and names of the ID cards, I used black bars to block out the identity of the homeless person.
To work within the constraints of perspective, I duplicated the layer I was working with and rotated it 180 degrees, and set that layer mode to Overlay. The two images layered on top of each other adds a level of ambiguity to the piece also; it’s difficult to tell which way is the right way up, and can be interchanged, allowing the viewer’s perspective of the piece to be altered.
