One of the first things that came to mind was materialism, as it is one of the problems more unique to the city (e.g. poorer rural areas are less concerned with material possessions when they have problems with day to day survival). Moreover, I had this photo from Assignment 1 in mind.
I intended to use it for deep depth of field but I chose the helix bridge instead, since this has nothing in the foreground that can be used as a reference point. However, I thought this photo looks rather nice, and since it's about the city, I can use it to depict urban fantasy.
Hence my idea for this assignment was to show the city being engulfed in materialistic pursuits, although the humans who live there may not be conscious of it. I did this by adding photos of money (coin and notes) onto the white spaces of the photo. In order to make the photo visually less crowded, I tweaked the original photo as well. Here is what I came up with:
(Note: Most of the montage was done before the last tutorial, Class Exercise 4, thus I probably did some of the editing the long way round. However, since I only started re-sizing the ArtScience Museum image yesterday, I converted it into a smart object ;))
I duplicated the ArtScience Museum photo a few times and separated the different elements. I had one layer of the water, one of the museum, and one of the background with the buildings and the night sky. I erased the buildings in the background of the ArtScience Museum, and re-sized the museum to isolate and bring more focus to it. I also made the background buildings smaller and used the stamp tool to fill up the resulting spaces. The opacity of the background buildings are then lowered.
Next, I put an image of a $1 coin into the sky. This functions as the moon, which can be interpreted as materialism being something urban dwellers look up to, since the moon is usually the first thing we see in the night sky as it is the brightest.
I then superimposed distorted images of notes onto the water, to make them seem as though they are floating in the water. They (as well as the coin) are deliberately out-of-proportion, to show that money overpowers the buildings, what's more the people (i.e. us) who live and work inside them. The notes layer are set to Vivid Light, Soft Light, or Overlay at different opacity to blend into the water.
I used money of $1-$10, and not $50 or more, to show that not only the rich are concerned with materialistic pursuits. I may change this if notes of $50 or more are more coherent with the ArtScience Museum photo, a place associated with the richer.
Lastly, I duplicated images of the ArtScience Museum, and changed their blending mode and opacity to make it look as though the museum is being drawn into the coin. I did this because I thought since the ArtScience Museum looks like a flower, and it is about the Arts, this may depict that nature and art are losing their significance to materialism. I'm not sure if I can edit anything to make the message clearer though, shall see how the critique session goes.
No humans are shown in the photo. This portrays the apathetic attitude towards materialism: as we do not see individuals in this macro view of the city (as a whole) being consumed by materialism, there is less motivation to change the way things are. The absence of humans can also show that people are generally unconscious of the negative effects of materialism that frame endless wants as needs. I think people find it difficult to relate to materialism as there is less human factor in general public discussion (e.g. as opposed to natural disasters, where people are filmed dying, which motivates others to help).
Here are the links to my images (I searched in Google Image first):
$1 coin: http://kforkiat.blogspot.com/2010/12/its-end-of-2011-one-more-day-to-go-for.html
$2 note: http://www.epier.com/BiddingFormDutch.asp?1859663
$5 note: http://notes.syazwan.com/2010/04/singapore-bank-notes.html
$10 note: http://notes.syazwan.com/2010/04/singapore-bank-notes.html
ArtScience Museum: Original
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