Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Boxed: A Senior Listener Lyric Photographic Diptych by Nicole Hu (2017)

My lyrical essay, titled “Boxed”, demonstrates the feelings and experience of a bisexual individual, the dominating heterosexual representation in our society, and how people deny bisexuality because they would rather categorize them as gay or straight. I learned from my subject the effect of lack of representation and how labels and stereotypes can pressure an individual to feel or act a certain way.

I chose the passage “You are in a box. You don’t know who put you here, but everyone put you here.” because it is a well rounded representation of how individuals are given a label in order for society to categorize them. It also demonstrated how the individual can not quite pinpoint what caused them to receive this label and this stereotype because it was caused by decades of prejudice and generalizations. I decided to put it in the chess piece, specifically a rook, for a couple reasons. For one, being unwillingly labelled and categorized can make someone feel like a chess piece being controlled by a higher power. Additionally, the specific chess piece I captured was a rook, which symbolizes a chariot in chess. Chariots were heavily armored and allowed people to be transported while on offense. Likewise, society’s tendency to label results in people putting up barriers.

In order to create my photo, I manipulated color vibrancy and curves in order to adjust the intensity of certain aspects of the photo. In order to colorize the chess piece, I used the pen tool to make a selection around it, and then inverted the selection and put a black and white photo filter. I then took the original selection around the chess piece and manipulated the hue to give it a cool tone and desaturated it. I created the gradient effect by first resizing my canvas and then using the gradient tool. After experimenting with multiple fonts, I chose the final font because it fit with the rigid figure of the rook and it appeared very rigid, like a chess piece. However, I do not think this rigidity came through once it was placed in the figure because of the distortion in its shape. In order to place the text, I made separate objects for each section of text using the pen tool in illustrator, and then placed the text into the objects. I then exported the figure as a png and placed it onto my photoshop document.
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