Final Project Kaylyn Thom

I chose to imitate Dyan Marie’s photo from the chapter reading of the palm because the misshapen swirls that interfered with the original lines on the hand caught my attention. I thought it was interesting that she tampered with the “life lines” of the person’s palm, showing that things in life may not go as planned. As I looked more into Dyan and her work, she does not use the swirling technique as she did in her work showed in the chapter. She uses other unique ways of altering her photos, to deceive the human eye. I adopted her way of developing her photos because, first, I have never seen any photos post processed like that before and having it mean something other than it just being a surrealist photo. Another reason why I wanted to take after Marie’s work was because I wanted to be able to take normal, everyday subjects and put a slight twist on them to make the viewer more intrigued and being left wanting more. My focus with this project was to allow the viewer to have to analyze the photos a little longer than they are used to. My goal with these photos is to catch the viewers a bit off guard and compel them to come back to it, and look a little closer. By inserting these swirls and other odd alterations to these, average and normal looking photos, it causes people to have to search for the bizarre alterations. Another, more deeper meaning of these odd adjustments is to let my viewers be just as intrigued as I was when I first laid eyes on Dyan Marie’s work, and to be able to cause people to think about life a little differently. Be able to help them understand through my pictures that life itself will not be an easy path or straight line, but some things, or events, are going to seem like they came out of nowhere, unexpected, just like the alterations featured in the photographs. And sometimes we won’t see those obstacles the first time around, making us dig deeper into those situations to get through them and to learn from them.