Concept
We are who we are, don’t blindly listen to other people’s comments, and don’t be blinded by standards.
We can have our own light, we don’t need to cater to beauty standards. Is makeup a necessity? No, they are just another kind of beauty.
Don’t be a sculpture at the mercy of others, be yourself, we are fireworks in ourselves.
Nowadays, many girls in life have an appearance and body anxiety, and they are bent on pursuing white and young and thin to meet the public aesthetics, but in fact, putting everything aside, they are wonderful in themselves.
So in Photo 1, I wanted to capture the beauty of women. In Photo 2, I will use various cosmetics, and sculptures to shape women in bondage.
Photo 1
I took many pictures of girls with fireworks and girls with flowers, and finally, I chose a picture of a girl standing on top of a building looking at the fireworks. The professor said I could adjust the light and shadows in the lower part of the picture to make them brighter and more echoing of the building itself. If it could still be improved, I would have the girl standing in the middle of two buildings.
Contact Sheet
My contact sheet is a continuous process of adding and improving as I make photo 2. I started out with a lot of lipsticks, perfumes, round airbrushes, etc. But I found that elements of the same shape echoed each other better. I also photographed the sculpture from different angles and took many pictures with small ribbons around the eyes of the sculpture. Also, just making a connection between two images from the conceptual structure does not allow the viewer to respond quickly. Therefore, I also needed to add a structural connection between the two. So I photographed many more square cosmetics.
Photo 2
I started by keying out the different sculptures and cosmetics photographed in the contact sheet in photoshop.
I tried to make the sculptures in a circle at first, but that looked very deliberate. So, I just placed the elements randomly and deleted some of them, and accidentally a triangular structure appeared. The most usage of lipsticks and other cosmetics is pink and red, so I add a green filter to the sculptures so that they can make a contrast. Also, I tilt one of them, to make them look at each other and create a triangle. Then Ineeded more triangles in order to have more of the same structure to make the image more harmonious.
I chose another firework as the base color of the photo and adjusted the transparency to 80 without ruining the overall tone. I also made a crown with lipstick and embellished it with flower petals, which is kind of ironic. I deleted some unnecessary elements, let two lipsticks represent two buildings, let the square cosmetics represent the Fence in Photo 1, I let the blush containing metallic elements appear again and again, they stacked up around the feeling of shackles to bind women. To make it more harmonious, I tried to make them thinner like a band.
To find more connections, I put two photos together. I found the circle element at the right-side bottom is quite isolated, so I deleted it. 
With the professor’s guidance, I copied and pasted all of the rectangles and tilted them as a whole to artificially construct another triangle. The overall image consists of red and green, which are contrasting colors, but if the two red bands reappear they will make the image too confusing, so I added a filter to make them black and white.
Conclusion
Let’s see what I got at last.
Photo 1:
Photo 2:
