This is a pop-up collage displaying the effects of red-tagging on photojournalists. Red-tagging is when a journalist has been branded as a member or an associate of an enemy party of the government, leading to blacklisting and harassment of the journalist in the hopes of stifling their work. This topic is of interest to me because red-tagging is a problem in the Philippines, my mom’s country, where photojournalists will be branded as terrorists or communists so the government has a public excuse to kill them. It is also particularly insidious for photojournalists due to economic circumstances, since the job market is still recovering from the pandemic and Filipino photojournalists must contend with lacking compensation for their work.
Specifically, my collage is depicting a photojournalist who is being hunted after being red-tagged, as shown by the red paper I used to depict a laser sight, because being killed by the government is one of the many dangers photojournalists have to face when they're red-tagged. It does integrate some drawing, such as with the camera, but it is less of a stand-up illustration than a stand-up collage, which does have its own benefits, as I was able to play with some different textured and patterned papers. It was also my first time doing paper engineering, which involves the skill of crafting the paper mechanisms that make the elements of my project be able to stand up and fold over without crumpling, which I learned thanks to this video teaching how to make a basic pop-up book page. Below, I took an image from above that actually shows the paper mechanisms that I used from the video that enable my collage to act as a pop-up project.
In the early days of photojournalism, cameras were the epitome of novel but riddled with inconvenience. They could capture a likeness in a relatively short amount of time compared to an artist, but they required extensive preparation as well as sensitive and cumbersome equipment to accomplish that goal. According to the video by the Getty Museum titled "The Wet Collodion Process" , "From 1851, until about 1880, the wet collodion process became the dominant method for making photographs throughout Europe and North America". It was also the majority of what made photography in this time so unwieldy. Collodion was the main chemical used in order to make the image, but it had a time limit before it dried up and became unusable. This is especially relevant to photojournalists, as their profession means they won't always be in reach of an area with a dark room, which necessitated carting a portable version along with them. But, of course, innovation is inevitable. Wha...
"Going Home", photo by Ed Clark, April 13, 1945 "Going Home" is an image that centers emotion in its scene. It has a very obvious main subject in the man with the accordion crying in the foreground, which in turn brings his sadness to the forefront of the focus of the image. He is relatively close to the camera compared to the other people in the background which makes him appear larger, in addition with his accordion which together have him take up around 2/3rds of the entire frame. The focus on the man and his emotions is also elevated by the choice of background. First of all is the contrast, with the man being African-American and thus darkskinned in a dark suit, placed with a bright white pillar directly behind him. It sharpens the overall contrast which helps guide the eye to his face, where is where the focus of the scene is intended to be, because it's the darkest area in what is otherwise a large section of a solidly white strip of the background. Seco...
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