Footsteps

The Struggle

Not an Average Trip to the

Supermarket

Afterward

For our final assignment we were at first given a picture taken by a famous photographer and told to free write about it, we probably spent an hour in class this day writing about the photo. The stories we came up with became the backbone for us to take our photographs for our visual stories. My original photograph’s context looked to be set in the 1950s, so I decided that for my visual story I wanted to keep that same theme because I just really liked it. I went out and took the photos at a local supermar-ket with my roommate, Whitney DeBilzan, who was the girl in my photos, it was a lot fun, I dressed her up to fit the theme, and in all it was a great photo shoot. This assignment got us to use a lot of our knowledge we had learned this year in Art 220. We first used our camera controls to capture the images to fit our story line, before that however I wrote down exactly what kind of photos I wanted to take on a piece of paper to go along with my storyline so I wouldn’t forget any while I was out and about. We uploaded our photos on to Adobe Bridge where we were able to organize our files into different folders; we had to create a five-image folder, a seven-im-age folder and a nine-image folder. To create an eerie effect I used to black and white filter on Adobe Photoshop to do so and played with the contrast some too. Changing the images to black and white really sets the mood of the photo in my opinion. After all of the images were edited and resized they were put on to Adobe InDesign into a storybook layout, the file was exported into a PDF then upload-ed to Issuu.com, which is an online publishing site.

There are three different stories within my whole project, Footsteps, The Struggle, and Not an Average Trip to the Supermarket. All of my stories have to do with a woman being either followed, abused or both.

My stories are predictable to say the least, and people had suggested that I should make them less predictable, but I really enjoyed the predicable essence of it. I am not the type of person to want to sit around and ponder the meaning of things. Taking the pictures really made me aware that abuse of women is something that happens everyday in the world. I never would have thought that the little free writing exercise we did and taking photographs would lead to such an awareness and concern to me. I am therefor dedicating this story to everyone who is a victim in an abusive relationship.

Heather Offenbacker