Point Hope

Project Statement: 

Among the three photos that I took, there's a common feature that special focus plays an important role in them. Some parts of each picture are out of focus, which somehow blurs the objects that I was trying to shoot. The three objects in the pictures, snowflakes, leaves and twinkle lights, are all things that seem to be nice and fairytale. However, the "out of focus" brings the sense of obscure and vague, and it hides the truth behind the seeming fairy tales. My aim of this project is to use these pictures as a metaphor to reveal the issue that sometimes things seem to be pretty and fancy, but people can be misled and disturbed by their perception when defining what they really are.

I took the first photo in front of Susan B. Anthony Hall in a midnight on a snowy day. The only technique I used was to turn on the flashlight, so that the snowflakes can be shaped as individual white circles. Snowflake is usually considered as the symbol of dream and purity. However, opposite to the seeming fairy tale, snowflake is also cold and fleeting. I use the black-and-white effect to express that snowflake here in my photo is not that dreamy and sweet as it used to be.  

Same to the second photo, I didn't take a picture of many clear leaves. Instead, I only focused on a few leaves in the front and left the leaves in the background blurry. As green leaf is always known as the representation of vitality and energy, the black-and-white effect I used here applies a sense of darkness and depression, telling people that fairytale things can also be negative and gloomy if you think them in a different way.  

For the last picture, I put a string of twinkle lights inside an empty Starbucks glass bottle. Thus, although the picture seems to be dreamy, the condition of the shooting process is actually not that nice. Similarly, I focused on only one twinkle light, and left the others blurry. The black-and-white effect I used here shows that, although the lights are pretty inside the bottle, they are still man-made products and will never be able to compare with the actual stars in the sky. Although they are good-looking, they are limited in this small bottle and could never show their beauty to the world.

All in all, the three objects that I shot are dreamy and fairytale themselves. However, just as they can also be negative and gloomy if we think them in a different perspective, we can't consider things in our lives too superficially, because sometimes truths are hidden behind the seeming fairytales.

Fairy tales are not always like fairy tales.