emily's project #2 statement of intent
Energy of Girlhood
Originally, the little girls in my neighborhood inspired me to do a piece about childhood, or girlhood. I shot one day at the park with the neighbor girls and got some pictures I really liked—especially one of Alana sliding down the slide with her tongue out. I thought that the photo captured all of the rambunctious energy and sass that these girls seem to embody. I liked that sense of energy and thought it might be interesting to explore that concept further.
I looked around in my grandmother’s yard for some way to capture a similar sense of energy, searching for flower buds or new leaves to show the potential energy in that young life. I came upon her grove of hapu’u ferns, which shoot up by uncurling from a tightly packed mass of leaves, stalks, and delicate spores.
Now thinking slightly more chronologically, I decided that my series would progress from the curled up potential energy of the fern shoots, to the explosive energy of Alana on the slide, to an image of lost energy. For this shot, I chose one of my tackier dresses—an acrylic thing with pink netting and gold embroidery. Although the dress itself has no life in it, the folds and twists in its fabric suggest some kind of subtle force or soft energy in them.
I struggled with my decision to present these images in black and white. All three of the images had vibrant colors in them that looked beautiful on their own, but they just didn’t seem to work together as a series. I spent a long time playing around with the “channel mixer” feature on Photoshop to finally decided upon a grayscale to use throughout the series. In the end, I am pleased with the way that the black and white photos show the very different textures between the three images; however, if I were to take the pictures again, I would pay more attention to the colors involved and how they relate to one another.