A project for English class 2019.

For my adaptation, I chose to turn Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl” into chromogenic prints overlaid with hand-cut vellum silhouettes of women. I chose “Girl” because of Kincaid’s inspirational and extraordinary use of vivid imagery. Each line of her monologue gave me a snapshot of her life in the ’70s; the moments I decided to focus on were “wash[ing] the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry… this is how to make bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot…” With each image, I kept Kincaid’s overall message of what it means to be a woman in mind: how overwhelming the expectations are. ​Kincaid’s story jumps between indoor and outdoor settings, so I decided on one image of indoors and one of the outdoors to reflect the settings of her writing. For the indoor image, I used an old image I took of my kitchen that looks like the image is divided in half by a wall. I used two silhouettes of different heights to visually represent a mother and daughter and positioned them in the half of the photograph that includes the kitchen. For the outdoor image, I used a medium format negative I found at work of clothes hanging on a clothesline in the Philippines. I placed three figures throughout the photograph: one large one in the foreground and two closer together in the background, all near the clothesline and hopefully appearing like they’re hanging clothes. All the images were printed in the International Center of Photography’s color darkroom by me during the last two weeks of its operation. I chose to print in color rather than black-and-white because I wanted the photographs to be visible through the vellum silhouettes. I feared that the image would lose too much clarity if it were to be in black-and-white. I was also inspired to shoot in color by the second line of the story, “wash the color clothes on Tuesday…”

I think that photography by itself doesn’t lend itself to the most coherent of narratives so by adapting Kincaid’s work, I lose a lot of the overwhelmedness and strictness the mother enforces onto the girl about the pressures of being a woman. However, I hoped to recreate those feelings through the vellum silhouettes. By using the semi-opaque material, the female figures become entangled with the backgrounds of the images -- they are the duties forced upon them by their womanhood. Furthermore, I wanted to emphasize this feeling of pressure by physically melting them onto the print using a hair dryer/heat gun. My expectation was that it would add a raised texture to the image, semi-distinguishing the women from their circumstances but clueing the viewer into their lack of freedom from the print. However as one could expect, paper burns when it heats up and doesn’t melt no matter how hard you want it to. I affixed it with super strength glue, but the vellum paper actually disappeared into the image. That effect was thought-provoking because the silhouettes were almost indistinguishable from the backgrounds, offering a new interpretation of women being inseparable from their home-making duties. But overall, the effect of the glue was unsatisfying so I shifted towards scanning the vellum and the print together that way the vellum would retain its opaqueness. I think manually adding silhouettes as opposed to taking photographs of women in surroundings adds a feeling of intrigue to the work; it makes the viewer question their presence rather than just accepting their place in these domestic settings. My adaptation is a diptych of photographs inspired by Kincaid’s story “Girl.” There are a lot of details that I leave out that could either strengthen this adaptation’s connection to the original or transform it into a new body of work with a different message of empowering women. I’m disappointed that the physical melting of vellum didn’t work and would definitely want to try again with vellum wax, although the heat of the wax might burn the print underneath. I think a way to strengthen the work’s connection to the short story besides increasing the number of images would be to pair phrases of her story with the corresponding images.