Textual Tension

The latest assignment for my photography workshop class was to combine text with an image. I've done this many times before (duh, posters), but I it had been a while since I'd done it just because. When I was younger and everything was an experiment I would often just have random poems or quotes just so I could add text to an image. 90% of the time the text had nothing (nothing) to do with the image. I had a lot of fun during those experimental days, but for this assignment I wanted the text to relate to the image.

I also thought my professor might appreciate that too.

I had these pieces on my bureau (I think dresser is a more common name) in my bedroom. They aren't arranged like this on the bureau, but after staring at them for a while I decided this scene would be a hilarious arrangement, and not only that, but I should photograph it.
I didn't originally shoot these for this assignment, but once I was shooting, I thought several of the compositions would look great with text added, so I thought why not?


Buuuut, once I edited this version, and created a text box I suddenly sat there like, ".........................". I complained to my sister that there wasn't anything that would make this funnier. Inherently, it had to be silent. She tried to encourage me, but I was very set in my ways. Nothing would work.
I look through other photographs, because at this point there wasn't enough time to reshoot. There really wasn't anything I felt like working with, so I opened up the image again and inside the text box I made an ellipsis, "...". I thought that might count as text, so I put the image inside those three dots (actually, that's a lie, I did it this way because it looks like a lego, and I was playing off the lego characters in the scene) <- That's not true at all, just really coincidental.

But once I had the dots, I thought the images were a bit more difficult to read (no pun intended), especially the buffalo, so I wrote, "dead buffalo" underneath it, which seems to clarify and have a certain blunt humor also. Underneath Hermione (the second circle) I wrote "embarrassed driver" (Ron was supposed to have been driving, but I put him on the wrong side of car. But in the text image, the telephone booth isn't in the image, which means they could be taking a trip to the U.S., so really I could have done anything), and underneath Ron I wrote, "surprisingly innocent" because he probably would have gotten into an accident as he used a confundus charm during his driving test.

I thought the image would still be kind of odd to read, but the students in my class seems to understand what it meant, although I did explain it to them. Perhaps they were just being nice. But it was generally well received. I think the piece is still stronger without the text. A strong, silent type of photograph, if that makes any sense.

Actually, that last sentence describes the photo horribly.