How do we make meaning from image?

I began with the annotation and redaction of images I’ve taken. Through this process, I began focusing on how textual elements interact with the images themselves. What is the relationship between language and image? Through this question, I began thinking about working backward from the images and thinking about how AI would see the image. My ideas developed into the relationship between writing the text that depicts the objects themselves compared to a layer deeper into their materiality. Most recently, I began also incorporating organic forms over the flora on the images and keeping visible text on the industrial parts of the images, playing with the layering of those and looking into that contrast created.  I had started with images I took and have now been diving more into the personal elements of this vs the universal. What happens when you take those descriptive words and change them into personal and emotional words?

I began working with paint pens on printed images of my original photography. The work was focused on the contrast between nature and industrial forms. I transitioned to digitally adding text, focusing on color-matching the text on top to the actual section of the image that I was writing over to ensure that the result had the most accurate perspective. I began altering the levels of integration with photoshop layer masks leading me to displaying these iterations next to each other to explore how their contrasts play off of eachother and how it changes your perception of the images. In terms of displaying them, I also worked through the ideas of scale and how that alters how you register the text as text versus object forms. I want to further explore how the integration of the simplified plant forms in the images–focusing on their value and balance in the image instead of their details–compared to the more stark text on industrialism.