Ian Ouyoung

ARS 281

 

Final Project: KOD

 

My inspiration for this project was a mixture of hip-hop culture and portraits from photographers who could capture a person’s motive with the snap of a lens. By taking notes from Yousef Karsh (most famous for his Winston Churchill portrait) and Brian Duffy (most famous for his David Bowie series), I could analyze how I could improve capturing the true aura of a subject. KOD by J.Cole served to provide me a theme that I could base my narration on, serving to add a cohesiveness between my images.

 

Telling a story through still images for me has always been a challenge that I’ve always wanted to tackle, but I could never think of a concept for the story until this class. For this project, I focused on addiction. Each image is meant to convey a stage of falling into or coming out of addiction. When we think of addiction we traditionally think of drugs, but at the core of it, addiction stems from your mental state. It slowly engulfs you, leaving you helpless to your own desires. To create my images, I consistently used a prism to show the bending or warping of the person’s mental state. I also used various props that should immediately hint towards the state of addiction the subject is in. I do not agree with the use or reliance on the items depicted, yet I do realize the strong message that these items can convey.

 

 

References:

 

Yousuf Karsh

 

Brian Duffy

 

KOD by J. Cole

 

https://www.centeronaddiction.org/