A Picture is Worth 1000 Words?

Today's exploring led me to really question how I feel about how important images and representation are to our society. I was a bit amazed by the amount of editing I was able to do with just a few simple programs, so imagine what a professional could do! Its amazing how easily someone can take an image and distort it in whatever way they want. Today also had me explore my own self-image because I was editing pictures of myself.

The first thing I was asked to do was to take a simple headshot of myself. Not too difficult. But as soon as I read that I would be taking a picture of myself I jumped out of bed to fix my hair. I had an almost knee jerk reaction to try and make myself more presentable. I've never really thought about this response before because it is so natural but now I finally am. Is this reaction because of societal norms? Or is it something I've seen growing up? Most likely both! I feel like society tells us that, if we are going to be in a picture, we need to look our best. Next time I'm asked to take a picture of myself, I think I'll do a little experiment and just photograph myself exactly as I am.

I was then asked to use this image and use it to Popart/Warholize myself and here is how my first image came out:

Not too great right? At least you can see my teeth!










Then, I decided to use an older image and see how that would work. Here it is!

Personally, I think this one is kinda neat! Sure I'm off center and you can't really see my face...but its neat!

Then, after experiencing some technical difficulties with installing Java, I used Face to the Future to mess around with my face even more! This was a very unnerving, silly experience. I feel like the images are not necessarily nice looking, but they really are interesting to look at!

 Like I said, interesting! While the first two are almost surreal to look at, the last one almost looks like me. In case you were interested, here is the original image:

Then I used another editing software, Pixlr to further mess around with this same picture. First, I decided to explore their "Retro" editor and this is what I came up with:

This one reminded me a lot of the program Instagram. I don't personally use it, but a good deal of my friends do. This was super easy to do and I feel like it added a bit more contrast and interest to my image. It was also very quick and easy to operate. Personally, I like it a bit more than my unedited image. I feel that it is more interesting visually. Here is the second image I created on Pixlr using just their regular image editor. This editor was a bit trickier to use but this is what I came up with:

I added a layer and decided to experiment with doing a very edited image next to the unedited image. I'm not very experienced with photo editing software, but I feel like I did a pretty good job! I added contrast and more of a red color hue to the image and did a few other little edits. I really this its interesting to see the contrast of the edited image versus the unedited image.

The more I play around with my own images, the more it makes me wonder about photo editing in advertisement. I know that a lot of editing is used especially in women's fashion advertising. Bodies are made to look smaller and faces made to look perfect. What is this doing to our self-image as people? Most likely distorting it. I think I'd like to play around more with edited vs. unedited images. There may be more photos to come! Thanks for reading!