Personal Manifesto Part 1

Part 1 of our manifesto week, had us looking at our own family heritage stories, to create a visual response. Manifesto is derived from the Latin word clear, the purpose of one is to inspire and put ideas out that would create a form of change. A medium where your present self can have a direct link with your future self. As a starting point I looked at old photos of my past relatives, what stood out to me the most were the black and white ones. The lack of colour created a different kind of atmosphere, setting the people in another time, this was something I wanted to portray in my final outcome. I began to de construct the figures and focused on the relationship between fathers and children.

 Asking my father about his earlier childhood memories I began to look at other ways I could symbolically present this. The oak is a natural motif of age and family, the acorn could represent a child while the developed tree the father. These are preliminary sketches to that idea,

Combining the outline of an image from an old photograph with organic forms found in wood, creates a continuous line shape figure. Developing further from this I tried to fragment the forms to represent the broken process of remembering past memories.

The colours used in one of my Photoshop developments plays with soft subdued warm effects. The yellow patches of colour act as the images focal point, highlighting the importance of the figures. Through past sketches, I experimented with the contrast of negative spaces and wanted to incorporate a duplicate of the actual photograph. The shapes are blurred to compliment the light colours. 

Through photographic manipulation, the shattered effect on the sides of the image are meant to symbolize the process of remembering distant memories. I kept it black and white to keep the traditional monochromatic format of the original black and white photo. The centre remains the least warped with the hands and trees in the background . 

 

A balance between the last two photo manipulations, there remains a warped like effect with addition of patch colours. A bright contrast between the figures with an emphasis on the negative space, in the top right corner the bushes resemble the top section of an acorn. The use of a more cold blue like shadow is meant to create a more of an nostalgic effect.