Original photos by ashi and harbor88, sources below, protected under Creative Commons
Westboro Baptist Kids by Brian Myers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Both based on a work at flickr.com (link to the other)
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://creativecommons.org/.
Image Sources:
Little Hate (Left) by ashi
Westboro Baptist Church (Right) by harbor88
TITLE: “Westboro Baptist Kids”
Resources, materials, and technologies employed
I used Creative Commons supported images on Flickr of child protesters of the Westboro Baptist Church, specifically those showing children with protest signs or materials that promote hatred to those the church does not like. I used medium versions of the photographs so they would be easier to resize and fit onto something resembling an ad. The technology I used was GIMP a free image editing software that has some of the same features as Adobe Photoshop.
The context.
The context would in debating the freedom of expression and the rights of protest, where the line has to be drawn between ideological differences and hate speech. Also the significance of how children are being brought into this.
Strengths and limits
Just showing a child carrying anti-Semitic and homophobic materials on them is strong. What I’d really want to do though is use even more examples, though with pictures of Westboro protestors run into the problem either by strict Creative Commons rules or copyrighted by the photographer. If I can find enough easily distributable to expand into an image collage I would.
The Argument
I’m trying to make the claim that the Westboro Baptist Church is exploiting the children of the group in order to push hate speech. By highlighting their signs and T-shirts I try to draw attention away from their youth and more to what they are promoting. The fancy Blackadder ITC lettering to make it look like a child-like postcard and putting it against a black background is to make the message clear; do you find this adorable? Children being plastered with hate speech? I try to leave the message not explicit, just to not force feed them a saying instead use the images as an example of what to think of.
Process Notes:
-I had thought of doing Westboro Baptist Church after the discussion we had on what makes a visual argument and some of the examples that we presented.
-Aside from resizing and putting two photos together, the other change I’ve made to the photos before discoloring most of them is cropping the boy’s photo. In the original there was a photographer in the shot, so I cropped out the photographer.
-The idea of highlighting just the material on their clothing and the sign they hold was something I wanted to do from the beginning. I got the idea of black-and-white vs. color as a way of griming up an image that is showing children, and highlighting why it isn’t such a pleasant thing.
-To make the signs and shirts stand out I used a scissors tool to copy the elements of both and paste them onto a new layer, so when I turned the picture beneath into black-and-white, the materials I sent to a new layer would be unaffected, left as they were taken. The scissors tool helped me go into the lines of the objects so that I would not have to do it painstakingly close. I also merged the clothing and sign layers to make it much easier to manage.
-I initially had the words say “Isn’t this adorable?” but I decided on “Aren’t they adorable?” just to bring it to the children.
Comparative Notes:
-Back in Photography for the Media class we were experimenting around with colors and objects with our photo projects.
-Usually it was to see a face in a different color or to highlight some objects better; using some of the same methods, though for the most of the photos I didn’t quite use the same effects as this project.
"Lady In Blue" Photographed and edited by Me
-When it came to one particular photo however, is what I call “The Lady in Blue” (above), a woman I had photographed for last year’s Teddi Dance For Love (An unedited version of the photo can be seen here). In the edited version I decided to drain all the color from the photo, except for the lady in a blue dress at the center. This is sort of the experience I have done in the past with the project, draining color to bring people’s eyes to where it is highlighted.
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