Photoshop Collage Experiment 2

 

For my second idea for a collage experiment I decided to have it focus around the way we as humans tend to separate ourselves from nature despite being a part of it. The main focus of the image is a person that I generated from the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, which I used to avoid concerns regarding consent. The person has parts of themselves that have been replaced with others, such as their body depicted exposed bones and muscles, meant to represent our core components that of which can be found in nearly every other animal on the planet. The persons head is notably mixed with various parts of plant life, such as tree bark, broccoli making up the hair, and pea pods and a grape making up the eye, with an apple as an iris. I chose an apple due to it's association with the biblical creation story, which itself has a habit of distinctly separating humans from the other animals god created. The apple being the iris represents how we see ourselves as unique or above the rest of the animal kingdom, despite sharing its origin. In the background I chose to have a posturized image of some leaves as another representation of nature, as well as several other pieces of symbolism.

 One of these is a repeated illustration of the evolutionary chart of man, depicting us evolving from chimps, to cavemen, and finally into modern humans, representing again how we tend to separate ourselves from the animal kingdom and see ourselves as "evolved", despite being no more evolved than any other animal. Another edited piece of symbolism I added is the image of an old diagram of the brain overlayed by the skull of a human and a gorilla spliced together, with the gorilla skull being coloured red and the human skull being coloured blue. This part is meant to represent how we tend to view humans as insurmountably more intelligent than the rest of Earth's animals, with humans and apes being the most common comparison, the red and blue colouring depicting the "bad and good" as seen by humans. This is meant to be from the biased perspective of humanity, as many apes are famously more intelligent than often depicted in common media.

Finally the text overlayed onto the image in the style of newspaper cut-out's reads "I think, therefore I am." a quote from the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes which implies the first step to attaining further knowledge, being the doubting of one's own existence that serves as proof of a conscience. This quote is commonly used to separate humans from other animals due to our ability to "think" making us far more unique. This is objectively false, as every other mammal can think and plan, even if not at the same level as humans. The quotes inclusion is meant to be another representation of our continued dissociation with nature and place ourselves above it, despite all signs of our existence pointing towards the fact that we are as much a part of nature as every other creature on Earth.

Overall I'm very happy of how the collage came out, and had a lot of fun exploring different compositions and colour palettes, with the newspaper cut-out styled text and skull fusion being particular favourites of the piece for me. Furthermore I'm happy with how I communicated the themes of my collage through its imagery and symbolism, though if I were to attempt it again, I would try to better combine the muscle and bone features to the person to make them more natural, and potentially include more classical illustrations of evolution, likely something depicting the garden of Eden.