For my visual hijack I hijacked typical heteronormative pictures from the 50’s-70’s and made them queer by replacing the straight couples with lesbian couples. I choose pictures from these time periods that I thought encapsulated the time frame best. I was seeking to hijack the kinds of pictures that first come to mind when one thinks about straight couples from these time periods. I wanted to hijack these pictures because I feel as though there is little to no representation of lesbian couples especially in the 50’s and so on in the 60’s and 70’s. I think it’s very important to have representation, it’s not like lesbian couples did not exist then, but without representation and evidence we are erasing them.
In the beginning of my project I was working with the famous V-Day kiss picture. I thought this was a perfect all encompassing image. I photoshopped an image of a women kissing to the original photo.
In crit, a discussion of the original picture being connected to sexual assault came up and imagine immediately became unuseable. If one person has that connotation then others will too and I do not want my hijacked imagine that is supposed to present love and celebration to be linked to sexual assault. During the same crit, the class and I brainstormed other possible ideas and from this, the idea of hijacking heteronormative pictures from the 50’s-70’s was born. A classmate also mentioned that I should check out the Sarah Lawrence College Archives for pictures of the faces that will be on the new images. I had conference the next day and we brainstormed even more and decided that I needed to look at A LOT of pictures from these time periods before I decide exactly which ones I want to hijack. From this conference the idea of a calendar was born. The symbol of the calendar is important to me. The idea of time passing and these women being there, still being here they have always been here. I love that the calendar is saying look! “Look at these couples, doing normal everyday things, they are being celebrated for being themselves.” After this conference I looked at probably a hundred different heteronormative images from the 50’s-70’s in order to get a clear picture of exactly what I wanted to hijack. I started editing prototypes to the final images.
I went to the Sarah Lawrence College Archives department and they let me look at the pictures they had from those time periods and more. I flagged the imagines I liked and they sent they to me as pdf’s a couple days later. Then I started making the calendar. I had a rough start in the beginning. I did not know exactly what I wanted the calendar to look like. I also spent a lot of time finding the dates for 1960. I wanted the calendar to hypothetically be from the year 1960.
After further thought I decided I wanted the calendar to be use able. I continued editing many images in order to get the ones I liked best After another crit in class I decided to redesign my calendar layout, and create a few more month themed imges. Ex; halloween and christmas. I included names for all the couples and the calendar itself has Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic holidays for the year 2017-2018. I also decided to use color and picked a very distinct yellow.
This is one of my finished calendar pages. I will be selling the calendars sometime in the next few weeks in Heimbold.
By the middle of my project I realized that I was becoming so incredibly empowered by creating a calendar full of lesbian couples. That surprised me more than I expected. I was also surprised when I started to get better at Photoshop. And I started getting excited to edit my images and wanted to spend more and more time working with Photoshop so that my images would look better.
In some of my images it is clear that the image has been messed with/edited but in others it is not as obvious. I did this purposely but also not at all. In the process of becoming better at photoshop I figured out how to blend pictures better and what tools could help camouflage the layering. But In some cases I liked how it looked when it was more obvious the picture had been messed with.
Throughout the entire project I was influenced by Gramsci. He introduced the idea of hegemony, this was the first time I had heard of this concept. “They do not know what they are doing, but they are nonetheless doing it” This quote spoke to me. It stirred up ideas of how back in these time periods it was normal to not see displays of gay and lesbian love. All of these “typical” images I hijacked were created because people thought that was how it was supposed to be, but they had no idea what they were feeding into! According to Gramsci hegemony is the only way to control an entire nation, politics is not enough. I loved the idea of how this is where we come in, to show the counter image and explain how they are brainwashed. The film “They Lived” influenced me as well, the idea that with my project I am giving people goggles to see what in the past they were not seeing. A quote of Dennett’s that stuck with me “survival of the culture is not the best of the best” this is one that reinforced my idea. Images of lesbian couples did not survive in the popular culture but that does not mean that the images that did survive are the best. This encouraged me to create the images that are the best of the best.
