Seeing Change Means Thinking Change

For this project I chose to use Photoshop to create a new image. With the election often being the topic of conversation wherever I go, I’m not surprised that the ideas that I played with in my mind were of Barack Obama and his campaign. His slogans for his campaign are always along the lines of “Change” and what he and it will do for America. To illustrate this concept of “change” very clearly, I thought of having an image of Obama cropped into or on top of or next to actual currency “change”, U.S. quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Not only is it a play on words of what “change” means in the English language, but it toils with something specific Obama wants to change, that being the economy. What better way to show the “change” he wants to accomplish in an image than with money itself?

Because Obama has the reputation of being an “intellectual”, I definitely wanted to find a way to make the image I was trying to create include the coins as part of him and also part of the surrounding image, almost as if the change was coming from him internally and he was staring down at it as it was happening around him. In Photoshop I was able to edit this photo of Obama looking down to be placed on top of the image of United States currency change all in the background. It got the point across, that being that Obama is and will bring change (not just economically, though the $$ indicates that mostly). However that didn’t look complete and I felt there were better ways to get this Obama slogan/platform across.

With the helpful comments from my neighbors (And you too, Jon), the idea of making the change become apparent in Obama’s head/brain started to emerge. To do this in Photoshop, I first had to find another image that I could make a shape in Obama’s head with. I played around with different images of cartoon brains but none of the images I found had high enough resolution to be able to cut out and still keep its shape as a brain. After that didn’t work out, I started to play around with the different auto-shapes Photoshop gives us and decided to use a “thought bubble” to cut out a selection of Obama’s head. I did not intentionally decide before hand to use a thought bubble in Obama’s head, however this worked out quite well and I think further shows that Obama is and will be and will bring change to the country. The image suggests (because this thought process is “change” in this image) that “change” is constantly on Obama’s mind and he has the power to execute a plan (that he has/will create) to make this change come to life. The thought bubble fit well in to Obama’s head in terms of shape and size (without much tweaking) and it (by accident) helped to reiterate the idea that he is constantly thinking of ways to make “change” possible.

One of the first things Berger talks about in his book is that the way we see things is affected by what we know. Because many people are familiar with the fact Obama’s slogan is “Change”, this image and the message it is trying to get across is probably very clear. However for those who don’t know who Obama is or what his platform is based off of, what are they going to “see” when they encounter this image? They will obviously recognize that a form of money is inside of another man’s head – this could be interpreted as the man in the image is concerned with money, is made of money, and/or has an idea (because the coins are in the shape of a thought bubble mostly) of how to generate money. But how would it become possible for one to associate this image with the idea of the other meaning of the word “change”? That could only happen if the person had previously knowledge of Obama and his campaign, proving another thing Berger wrote,that what we know completely affects what we see (the knowing would have to come first, obviously). Berger also says the photographer’s (in this case the image-creator) way of seeing is reflected in his subject choice. Obviously what I saw previously, which would have been Obama demonstrating he has the ability to “change” America for the better, affected/influenced this image. It took me to “see” this first for others to be able to “see” with me, and it took both of our previous knowledge to finish the “seeing” process.

I finally got my image to satisfy me by messing with the layers on Photoshop to be able to erase all the change around Obama and leave only the change that was visible in the thought bubble. This in my opinion helped to illustrate the double meaning of the image (change for the country, including economic change) most clearly, by really illuminating the fact that Obama can be and will if elected the one to bring/execute this plan for “change", not only because of his constant thoughts on how to do so but also because he has the gift (intelligence would be considered a gift in most places...the brain/head symbolically represents intelligence) to do so.