Citizen Diptych

Taking a line from our English lyrical essay and a photo from our street photography, we created a diptych, an art piece on two panels.

A Citizen, A Child

My lyrical essay is about the experience of being a child of a single parent and the final line is “You are powerless, yet so powerful.” 

My essay is about how a child doesn’t have a good relationship with her father and her mother is always busy. I chose this photo because the photo includes a mother and her daughter. Both of them seem plain face or upset. The pair also look distant and distracted by other things. I think this photo really exemplifies my essay because it shows the contrast and distance in the mother daughter relationship. 

I started by cropping the photo, as the original photo had a lot of other people. I used Adobe Photoshop to edit the photo. I first turned the photo black and white. I then used the gradient tool and changed the gradient layer from black to white to black to gray. I changed that layer into overlay mode, which made it almost an x-ray effect. From there, I used the brush tool to brighten the daughter and create a vignette effect around the pair. Lastly, I copied all the edits on to a new layer and used the brush tool to take away the black and white effect on the daughter. I made a selection of the daughter, filled it with black, and placed it on the right of the photograph. I then wrote the final sentence of my lyrical essay and warped the text to fit within the selection. I chose a very straight font to show conflict and contrast between the two. I also chose to make powerless to stretch up to show being powerless makes you want to float and disappear. Powerful is stretch down because a powerful stance is usually with two feet firm into the group, standing up for themselves.