Isleen_Voyages
In this project, I tried to convey what it feels like growing up as a teenage girl in an immigrant family. It's a reflection of how my teenage years, especially the ones over the past four years in high school, were bumpy as I navigated my relationship with my mom, myself and my body image, religion, and school. It focuses on small moments that I would have back then not realized, but now, after having lived them, see and understand more clearly. I played with a variety of colors, especially for some photos I took at school to symbolize how much more vibrant my life often felt when I was on campus. On the other hand, the photos I took at home are much more muted, mellow, and overall thematic to represent the loneliness, anxiety, and stress I often felt after a hard day of living up to academic and social pressure to be the most perfect version of myself.
I like my Muybridge-style repeated photo of peeling the tangerine. In a lot of Asian immigrant households, adults communicate care and love through acts of service, often times including peeling or slicing fruits for their children to eat. In this photo, my mom peeled a tangerine for me even though I didn't ask her to because (a) she knows I hate peeling them, but also on a more serious note, (b) to show how she cares for me after I had a rough day that I didn't want to talk much about. Lots of my photos are centered around something similar, where the hidden meaning lies in the detail!
