MCKENZIE STYLC

People often question who they are. Identity is used to describe who someone is. Throughout the brainstorming process, I thought about someone having identifying features and personalities, someone having multiple identities, and someone’s identity being lost. Ultimately I chose to use someone’s identity as being lost.

What happens when someone loses their identity. I immediately thought about the image of a crime scene with someone dead in the middle of the photo. After shooting these two photos the idea of someone losing their identity was not being portrayed as well as it could be. I went back to the crime scene photo and decided to take a photo of someone with a toe tag on, like they are dead, and chose to change the identity number the police use in the lab, use a student ID number.

By using the student ID number it conveys the message that school causes students to lose their identity. For example, students wake up, go to school, come home, do homework, go to sleep and repeat. Students can’t enjoy life like they use to be able to do when they were children. The message of this photo is during the school year students become their student ID number and lose their social life due to the amounts of work and stress.

To make this photo I took a note card and poked a hole through it. I tied the toe tag around the subjects big toe to represent a toe tag labs use when someone is declared dead. Using the white background causes the main focus to be on the subject’s toe tag rather than the background.

Throughout this process I first took a picture of a crime scene, and then took a picture of people with “non- identifying” features. After comparing these photos I thought that the message wasn’t being represented best through these ideas, so I created the toe tag idea.

To decide on this direction I compared doing a positive idea and negative idea. The positive idea was that everyone has different identifying features and it would be many pictures of different people with different characteristics and features. Since that idea wasn’t conveyed as well as I wanted I decided to go with the more negative aspect of identity.