Seeing in black and white

After giving this subject some thought my initial idea was to do something race related, I wanted to challenge peoples opinions and judgements. I wanted to raise the question. Are people judged by colour?

I had ideas such as having a black person in a business suite and a white person in baggy clothing, I also played on the idea of property, placing a skyscraper next to a "hut", I wanted something to make people question their thoughts.

After some discussion with a tutor I decided on the idea of having silhouettes lined up as in a police lineup, but 3 of the silhouettes being standard shapes where as the fourth would be much taller and wearing more "threatening clothes" such as "hoodies" which is big in the media at the moment.



Once taking the idea to the studio I had some major problems at first with lighting, I was trying to make a silhouette figure and I was just getting way too much light on the subject, as you can see in the circled areas above.

I managed to conquer this problem my moving the model, positioning him further away from the background..



I was impressed with this picture, as I didn't think I'de get such a quality picture.
This made it alot easier for me once taking it to photoshop.

My initial piece was as follows:



I liked this image but my thoughts were that it was rather plain, after discussion with a classmate we both felt the same.

I then decided to add a grunge-style backgroun to enhance the photo, I was pretty pleased with the image and here was my final result: