Photography and Text by Wenjia Guo, Copyright 2018
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EMOTIONAL CHANGE
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Do any static images appear when you see the words love, happiness, sadness and despair? Could these simple words also be expressed by simple eye contact? What rushed in to my mind is the vivid slices of life, the crisp laugh, the groan of pain. I chose my roommate as my subject for this sequential portrait, since when I see her face, I could tell her love, her happiness her sadness and her despair.
The templet is also a challenge. The arrangement of the four strong as well as contradictory emotions by 35 frames which could form one picture required more thought. When I drew the draft, I decided to use a symmetrical layout to engage the emotions. Also, I preferred to illustrate the transformations between different emotions, which is the unique advantage of this templet. By presenting six different expressions I tried to express a dynamic mood. You could feel the happiness through the left two smiling faces, you could see the love though the tender eyes in the middle, you could sense the sadness from the right two faces, and the despair of the bottom right two. Even more, from the top you could see the smile faded away and the sadness came up, and at the bottom she sank into despair. From the left top to the right bottom, the height of the face and the degree of saturation gradually decreases, which also showed the transforming of the mood.
I always believe that emotion is so complex that it could not be defined simply by a photograph, an expression or a word. It is so personal that I hope everyone can find different emotions from this single image.
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About The Author: Wenjia Guo is a Graduate student in the School of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania.