Identity Crisis

Posted on 6.10.09 - View Comments



Identity Crisis, originally uploaded by evantravers.

Don't worry, I'm not having an emotional breakdown. My financial identity was stolen over the past week, and I've been quite tied up between school and dealing with that. Still not over, so if you have any advice as to what to do I'd appreciate it.

As a result of this thievery, I got very angry, and last week decided to turn that anger into some photos, both to calm down and to maybe capture something about feeling out of control of my own social security number/bank account. (How I intended to get that into a photo, I don't know.) I went into a room, snapped off a few photos, they all stunk. Horribly. I threw them into the computer and forgot about them for two weeks. But… last night I decided to see what I could do with them. This was the result.

It's hard proof just how important post production is in this day and age. Here's a progression of what I did. First, monochrome and levels, followed by dodge and burn a judicious crop. Still not the greatest self portrait ever taken, (the model isn't that great) but at least it's not worth tearing my eyes out over. Incidentally, all the work was in Aperture 2.0, not photoshop itself.

This got me thinking. I pondered about how the total image I project on the internet is 50% post production, just like this picture. I send out to the world what is me, and what I want to be me, and it gets jumbled up until it is what you get when you google Evan Travers. It's not really an accurate image, really. After a year of making myself completely open and trying the whole open life/internet thing, I'm slowly limiting access to myself. Turning off notifications, unsubscribing, unfollowing… I guess you could say I'm trying to get quality over quantity but I'm really just trying to focus on the real things. I'll still comment on your photos, but maybe not all of them. I'm going to still post photos. But not every day. Just a strategy.
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