Photo Collage - Thumbnails

After working extensively in Illustrator and InDesign for most of the semester, we were assigned a project that would give us some experience in Photoshop. The assignment was that we need to chose a historical event, and then depict use at least six images to depict it. It needed to have an emotional impact on the viewing audience as well.

I decided that for my historical event I would do the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Not the most cheerful subject I know, but I have horrified fascination with the subject of nuclear weapons. I am a big advocate of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, I even wrote a paper on it for Comp 120. But moving on with the design process, I sat down and started making various thumbnails. Initially I wanted to do a sort of time line, with pictures leading up to the bombing. There would be a big picture of the mushroom cloud and from there the time line would split. One line would be that of the US, celebrating the end of the war with grins spread across their faces. The other would be the time line of Hiroshima, with images of the destruction and victims of the attack. I also had various designs that tried to fit images into larger shapes, like a bomb or japan or something, but they felt rather empty.

The concepts that I decided to work with were sort of varied. One idea was that I wanted to find the image of Truman holding the paper with the "Dewey Defeats Truman" and superimpose that image over a picture of the wasteland that was formally Hiroshima. I wanted to make people realize that even if a war is won, there are still enormous costs.

Another image I wanted to work with was an image of a mushroom cloud that would be composed out of various pictures of victims of the bombing. My only concern is finding enough images to make a composition that big.

The final concept that I was going to turn into a rough was the image seen at the top of page two. I thought that just a simple picture of a mushroom cloud, with images of victims (and possibly perpetrators) surrounding it. This would allow people to make a connection between the event and the aftermath. Adrienne also suggest thatI might superimpose a pictograph of an atom in the picture, adding transparency of course.