Photo By Bowen Tao
This photo was shot in New York City, USA May 2020 during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and after the death of George Floyd (an African-American man who was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis).
I took this photo as inspiration and use it as the starting for this project.
Week 1
Method 1
For the first experiment, I was exploring the idea of how the change of different language would result in different reaction of understanding this image. Also by translating the words in Chinese into different languages I want to challenge and to resolve the language barriers people have come across.
Method 2
The second iteration is to place the content in different places which creates different impact and different story behind.
Method 3
The third iteration I tried to play with the treatment of the same images to see how can different treatment emphasis different part of the images and brings the reader different feelings.
Week 2
For the final version, I decided to make a zine named love in quotation mark and translate them into 10 most used languages in the world because the things illustrated in the zine are also global issues and taking my ideas from first iteration, I want to resolve the language and cultural barriers.
The zine tells a story of love with quotation marks around this first image with a set of documentary photographs. It is separated in to two chapters that explain the story behind the images: why would be message like this on the street, why is it in Chinese, why is there policy walking around, and why people in the background are avoiding these polices.
The first chapter is about covid pandemic, which illustrated many story of love and unable to love because of this pandemic and social distancing and to call someone you love when they are still able or just to check up on them in this special period of time.
The second chapter is about racism. It explained the why there would be Chinese written in New York street as well as people are avoiding the polices. It also tells a story of hate which is the antonym of love but at the same time love still exist even in the dark times, which is why I chose this image to end the zine.