The Meaning Behind Tattoos Photo Essay Final Draft Jenna DiGennaro 5/3/16
Introduction: I wanted to do this essay because, even though I don’t have any tattoos, I am very interested in them. I know that when most people get tattoos, those tattoos have an underlying meaning behind them. I want to convey these messages through the pictures in this essay. This will be a story of underlying meaning of tattoos told through pictures of them. I was trying to think of a topic to use for this assignment and I was having a hard time. I kept going back to things that I couldn’t take pictures of myself. As soon as the idea of tattoos popped into my head I knew that I had to use it. This is an important subject to me because I eventually want to get a tattoo. I haven’t got one yet because it is going to be on my body for the rest of my life and I want it to really mean something to me. The photos that I took and chose to use in the essay are of people that are important in my life. The tattoos on them have meaning and that will be conveyed in the photos. In my opinion, tattoos should have meanings. I have a friend that just gets tattoos to have them and that might be something that she regrets in the long run. Most of the tattoos in this essay have meaning, but I am using two photos that don’t have a background. She got them because she thought they would look cool. In the following essay I will convey the meanings of real tattoos and show tattoos that don’t have an underlying meaning.
Believe in yourself
What does it mean?
Looks cool
Photo Analysis: The photos that I have chosen are out of the collection that I took. I chose these photos because I feel as though they will show the viewer the message that I am trying to convey. They show the meaning behind the tattoos that are in the collection and they show that some tattoos do not have a meaning. I also noticed that every picture that i took of a tattoo has a blemish on the subject. This shows the realness of tattoos. They are drawn on human bodies with a needle. They are drawn over blemishes like freckles and moles. The realness of tattoos really shows in these photos and that is part of the reason that I chose them. I think that it is important to show both the good and the bad sides of tattoos. Tattoos can be faded and old and still have a better meaning than a freshly drawn tattoo and I think that that is something that is being portrayed in my photo essay. The faded tattoos that I have chosen to use have meanings behind them. They portray memories of people that have passed and they are quotes that mean something to the subject. The freshly drawn tattoos that I chose to use don’t really have an underlying meaning. By talking to the subject, I asked her why she chose to get the tattoos and she said “They looked cool.” Kelly stated in her article, “[Jo Spence’s] pictures work together to challenge the viewer’s perception of themselves” (441). This is a good point and I think that tattoos do the same thing. They make the subjects think about themselves in a different way and alter the perception that they see of themselves because having a tattoo literally changes the composition of their body.
I have chose this topic to persuade people of the real meanings behind tattoos. I want people to understand that the stereotypes that come with having tattoos do not really mean anything. The people in my essay are normal people who work for their money and do their best to get by. They are not what people think of as the “typical” people that have tattoos. Some people can’t get hired at a job because they have tattoos. This essay shows that hard working people are hard working people, even though they might have tattoos. Tattoos are beautiful. That is another reason why I chose this topic. I feel like tattoos should be documented and appreciated. They work together to show that tattoos have underlying meanings. They are all so different, yet all have meanings even if one is “it looks cool.” These tattoos have depth, blemishes, and meanings, and I think that I showed those meanings by the way that I took the pictures and by the way that they were edited. For my photo essay I used my iPhone camera. I used this because I felt like I could get the best pictures from it. I also used a editing app called “Tadaa.” With this app you can filter, adjust, crop, clarify, frame, blur and sharpen images. It helped me to make the tattoos clearer and look more appealing.
Believe in yourself: I wanted to talk about the picture titled “Believe in yourself” because I feel as though it has good photo composition. With the tattoo being in the foreground of the photo it shows depth of field. The background of the of the photo is blurred pulling your eyes to the tattoo. The photo also shows texture because the tattoo in the front looks like it is almost coming out of the photo. The blurred background is almost pushing the tattoo out of the picture. The image does not have symmetry, but the person’s arm/tattoo is almost cutting the image in half. On the bottom of the photo there is a pathway and some bushes. The top of the photo has a tree and a fence. These things on the top and bottom of the photo work together to bring out the foreground of the photo; which is what I want the viewer’s eyes to go to. The greens of the grass and the trees/bushes and the reds of the bricks also work together in the blurry background to pull your eyes to the foreground. They are pleasing to the eye because the red is a warm color and the green contrasts with the red. Susan Sontag wrote in her article, “In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, standards are always being imposed on the subject” (3). This is true for this photo and all of the other photos. They have standards that are being imposed on the subjects like lines and foreground and background. The lines in the picture are in the background. There is a pathway which your eyes follow. The pathway almost pulls your eyes directly to the tattoo which is a good feature of the photo. The colors are pleasing to the eye. The off kilter background is also pleasing to the eye because it also makes your eyes look at the straight part of the picture.