Dealing with Identity

Identity: Everyone struggles with it. Learning to reconcile who you were then vs. who you are now can be tricky, especially around periods of dramatic transition like college when suddenly nothing is as it once was.

I’ve been thinking a lot about identity recently, especially as mine begins to settle in around me. So when our professor handed out the photo illustration assignment and invited us to think about potential topics this was the first one that came to my head.

For those of you who don’t know – a photo illustration, in journalism at least, is a photo which shows aspects of an issue in an abstract way. There are a few examples here. Of course there are inherent issues with photo illustrations in the news. Many argue that photo illustrations shouldn’t be used because they don’t show the straight truth, rather an artistic rendering of it. On the other hand when done well photo illustrations can often capture the heart of the matter in a way a traditional news photo can’t.

I felt that was the case with the issue which I wanted to show. Identity is a difficult topic to photograph, it’s invisible, intangible, and often very big and scary. By whimsical-izing identity I took away all those issues and made it a more approachable topic.

I wanted to personificate this metaphorical struggle by turning it into a real struggle which could show up on a screen. The idea of someone lugging around a pile of words on their back was amusing and simultaneously revealing. When you are dealing with identity it can feel almost like a tangible weight which you must drag around behind you and fight constantly. Even if you like both who you were then and who you are becoming you still can’t be both at once. You have to pick and chose, either trait by trait or by wholesale persona, who you are going to become.

While I wouldn’t say that I’m exactly struggling with my identity, I have certainly learned a lot about myself since coming to college. There are many traits, like hospitality, which I thought were more a part of my home culture rather than a part of my identity. But the constant whirlwind of people in my dorm room has become a reveling clue that maybe I’m more hospitable than I once thought.

But for some people, discovering themselves is not as enjoyable. I know many college freshmen struggle in the face of plunging grades, new friends, new social habits, and changing career choices. In situations like these, discovering yourself becomes a burden rather than a pleasure. I wanted to draw attention to this issue through depicting in in a photo illustration.

Amusingly the hardest part of the whole project was getting my models not to laugh during the photo shoot. Both Emily and Savanah helped me out with this project, a bad call in hindsight since they are two of my most giggly friends. They had a horrible time keeping a straight face while pantomiming strange positions and interacting with objects they couldn’t see. In the left panel I kept telling Emily to put more angle in her body, to which she replied that if she put any more angle in her body she would fall over. “Well then,” I said, “fall over!”

I put my camera shutter on burst and made her fall backwards at lest three times before I had a frame I liked. Oh the things people do for their photographer friends…

After I had the shots I put them into Photoshop for a few minor touch ups to the lighting and saturation. Then I started working on the words. Every one was individually sized, shaped, and placed. I had Emily pose as though she were holding objects, then I layered the words on top of the photo and erase the parts where her hands or body came in front.

I actually really enjoy manipulating photos, it’s almost therapeutic some days. The words I used were just whatever came to my mind at the moment as well as the way I arranged them. While Photoshop itself can be amazingly obnoxious it does lend total creative control to photographers. Whatever I wanted to do there was a way to do it.

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Jumping back to the issue of identity to wrap up. It doesn’t matter what stage of life you are in, identity matters. It can be hard and annoying, and also the most exciting adventure of your life. Throughout all stages of life we are faced with choices about who we are and who we’re going to become. Those choices can seem daunting, like a giant jumble of photoshopped words, but they are important.

So my final question for you is, do you know who you are? What parts of your identity scare you, what parts are you proud of? I think the first step to solving any problem is to make it visible. It’s hard to change something you can’t see but if we choose to take a good hard look at the piles of words following us around we might find something beautiful.