Photo Diptych Documentation

Photo Diptych

Name of Project: Wonderland

by Alina (Yuke Zhang)

Concept

The concept of my photo diptych is to show a comparison between reality and imagination. On the left is the original picture that I took with my camera. It is a bell tower taken in the center of Shanghai. As I walked around there, I saw so many old beautiful buildings, but only a few people stopped and had a look at them. So I felt it was a pity that the ancient buildings were ignored by the public and started to imagine a story behind this building. What if the building is a castle in a quiet place or in the tales instead of as a normal tourist attraction in the noisy city? And I want to create a wonderland with dreamlike scenes in my diptych project.

Process

I took the photo with the bell tower in an evening. At that moment, it was my first time exploring the city of Shanghai. It was crowded there, but I noticed that tower at first sight. Its solemnity matched with sky in the dawn, but it formed a strong contrast with the flood of people. 

It took me 12 hours to finish the right picture with Photoshop. Before I came up with this idea, I created a contact sheet containing different colors of skies at different times.

To begin with, I tried to combine these scenes of skies together to show a magic world in my project, a world with warmth and a world with all the memorable things. Also, I chose some curves and straight tracks cut by the pictures and changed their colors in order to show the stretch and the “magic”. For example, I stuck a rail and changed its direction. Also, the straight lines are the bridge, which is also used to separate different scenery. At that time, I tried to use a pen to draw one in order to create something new, but the image didn’t combine well with the drawn line. So I gave up and recut the whole bridge from the original photo. At last, I replaced the flagpole with flowers to make the picture more romantic and put some stuffed animals  to make the whole picture more lively. 

Here is my creating process:

Conclusion:

Actually at first, I didn’t fully understand the concept of the diptych project. But I think I understood more during the process. So it’s a pity that maybe I can do better If I could feel the concept of the project earlier, and I can change some elements in my artwork. For example: reducing the portion of scenery and replace it with some objects.

If I have more time, I will make my concept more clear and trace back to some historical stories and show the classic feeling. As my original aim of creating the photo diptych is show the contrast between reality and fantasy, I would like to use some legend and tales to extend flow of history.

All in all, do we find our ideal wonderland in this Photo Diptych?