Word & Image: What Will People Know?

A year ago at my junior college I was enrolled in a class that dealt with the technical aspect of Adobe Photoshop. I was a complete novice at the time, maybe working with photoshop for only a handful of weeks before this project was assigned. The instructor gave each student a song by Neil Young entitled "After the Garden". Utilizing a line from the song with an interpretation using image how we see fit, we had to describe what we heard. Being open-ended, I decided to think of how to encapsulate the song within an image. It wasn't easy.

The song basically discusses what life would be like after another war. A concept all too familiar amongst our nation. I began to brainstorm how exactly to capture the song. A ying-yang came to mind for some reason, a visual symbol of balance. The song deals with war and it's humble offerings as I tried to think of how a ying-yang can represent that with little success. The finished ying-yang came out well after superimposing the orange/red half onto a photograph of Earth. The left side is rifled with happiness and jubilation while the right side is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, depicting scenes of terror and violence.

The phrase near the top of the image summarizes the collage. If the populace is aware of such evil throughout the world, then whey are we always so happy? We will not get brought down by the seemingly endless threat of diabolical schemes, we will become strong, as we have proven. We come together, as the left side depicts, countless ethnicities flood the page, all smiling. What will people know?