A Show of Hands

Hands raised high and clenched into fists. Fingers typing frantically on a keyboard. Palms held open in a welcoming embrace. It’s easy to see that hands say a lot.

A hand gesture in paintings, sculptures, or photographs can convey powerful religious, cultural, and political meaning and symbolism. A gesture is a precursor to speech in human development. Gestures carry weight in daily conversation, in any language. By employing the hands, American Sign Language (ASL) expands and opens up communication for so many people. Finger positions and subtle hand movements can be seen as divine as in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, or mudras, the rich and complex symbolic gestures in Buddhist art and sculpture.

Project Inspiration
Hands appear in many prompts for my drawing classes and AP studio courses. Our foundational drawing classes begin with blind contour line drawings of hands and stippling hands with meaningful objects. Advanced drawing students feature hands in self-portraits with alternative processes like photograms. (See “Snapshots,” page 51.)
The symbolism of hands and touch became even more relevant during the pandemic; in particular, in the context of virtual versus “real” or in-person relationships and interactions. Thatʼs when I decided to find space in my AP Photo class to combine photographs of hands interacting with a virtual feature.

Inspired by the importance of physical touch set against the impact of virtual distance, I presented students with a prompt: Combine simplistic photographs of hands in a thoughtful gesture (representing the human/self, the tactile, and the physical) with a neon line created in Adobe Photoshop (communicating an imagined idea or narrative, the intangible, and the virtual).

The resulting images were powerful examples of the use of line as a visual agent of emotion and story.

Photographing and Research
Students began by creating a series of black-and-white images of gesturing hands. Some students worked together to photograph multiple hands together, while others took photos of hands holding objects. I encouraged them to play around with framing, but we ultimately decided on a simplistic and neutral background to highlight the texture and form of the hands themselves.

We then looked at Tina Modotti’s Worker’s Hands, stock images of hand photography, and the Google Arts & Culture feature, “Hands That Say A Lot” (see Resources). During one class period, I had students gather examples from any visual work that could be classified as emphasizing or using the hand for a symbolic or narrative meaning.
Students spent time online collecting images in various artistic media from multiple countries and centuries for a variety of political, social, spiritual, and personal narratives and contexts. I asked them to present one final image that they had researched and investigated to the class.

Virtual Lines
Our next step was skill-based. I showed students how to create a line in Photoshop, adjusting the pixel size and using the pen tool to play around with effects using inner and outer glow. Once they understood the use of the tool, they played around with their black-and-white images and merged the hands and fingers with this virtual line. A few students experimented with adding geometric or organic shapes as well. The resulting glow, mimicking neon light, offered a graphically dramatic pairing of reality with invention.

The Inferred Connection
The ultimate goal was to have students’ lines meander, shift, tense, and release to create a literal connection from one image to the next. Technical and conceptual conversations and sharing of experiences ensued as students worked together to change file sizes, ensure consistent resolution, and share exact measurements of where their line went off the page so they could create a fluid line.

One line was inspired by a Keith Haring painting, another by the rhythm of a heartbeat. Water falling, retro graphics, cartoons, and superpowers influenced others, and a collaborative story line became a topic of conversation. The images that students created in isolation were brought together, and the “line” of communication transformed into an anchor, a thread of commonality that became more evident as each piece was hung next to its neighbor.