Connecting Essay Three

This is a photomontage I found on the internet focused on someone's face. I like this picture because it has a funny, idiotic element to it. This brings about humour and excitement to the work of this photographer. The enlarged eyes and mouth show an exciting personality and the omission of the nose removes any distraction from the other facial features that the photographer is trying to show off. Even though the picture is in black and white, the viewer can see that the main subject's eyes are a bright colour; perhaps a light blue or green. This brings out this feature even more and makes it noticeable as the first thing viewers will focus on as soon as they see the picture is most likely to be the eyes and the mouth. Overall, the head of this subject is bigger than her body, once again, this adds to the humour of the picture and brings excitement as well as laughter to the viewer.

This is my picture of a shoot I did where I focused on facial features. I manipulated the mouth of my main subject to make it look humorous and surreal. Her eyes are closed so that the viewer has nothing else to concentrate on other than her mouth, this removes any distraction. The white background was used deliberately as it contrasts with my subject and once again, it's plain so that it provides no distraction as I wanted the viewer to only focus on my subject's mouth. The enlarged mouth is further emphasised as her facial expression does not match her smile - this is so there is a contradicting between her emotions and what she is pretending to feel. This represents how individuals put on a front when they are really unhappy inside.

These pictures are quite similar; they both consist of manipulating facial features in order to add some humour to the photograph. Although the picture from the internet is in colour and mine isn't, they both ensure that the viewer has nothing to focus on other than the features that have been manipulated and similar techniques have been used in both photographs to show this. By cutting off the body at the shoulders in both images, distractions are avoided, the clothing is also simple, nothing that would take attention away from the face. Moreover, both pictures show the subjects smiling with their teeth - this shows a theme of happiness and laughter, although in my picture, the happiness isn't real. In contrast, I have not omitted the nose in my picture as I didn't feel it would steal any attention.