Digitally Manipulated Image

After my first class with Dr. Langran, in which she introduced the idea of tableaux photography, I incorporated the strategy into one of my lessons on Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.  A synopsis: the novel is set in 1939 Munich and the protagonist is a foster daughter named Liesel Meminger.  Her foster parents hide a Jew named Max Vandenburg in their basement.  Liesel and Max befriend each other and try to survive in Nazi Germany.

For the tableaux activity, I paired students and assigned them short passages from Part Four of the text.  One of the passages was titled "The Sleeper," a section that describes Max Vandenburg's exhaustion upon his arrival and Liesel Meminger's curiosity about her new housemate.  The students pictured above chose the most representative image from "The Sleeper" and posed for a tableau photograph.  Below is the original:

In the image, Liesel watches Max, "the sleeper", and sizes him up.  An excerpt:

Max Vandenburg slept for three days. 
In certain excerpts of that sleep, Liesel watched him.  You might say that by the third day it became an obsession, to check on him, to see if he was still breathing.  She could not interpret his  signs of life, from the movement of his  lips, his gathering beard, and the twigs of hair that moved ever so slightly when his head twitched in the dream state.
Often, when she stood over him, there was the mortifying thought that he had just woken up, his eyes splitting open to view her--to watch her watching.  The idea of being caught out plagued and enthused her at the same time.  She dreaded it.  She invited it.  Only when Mama called out to her could she drag herself away, simultaneously soothed and disappointed that she might not be there when he woke.
Sometimes, close to the end of the marathon of sleep, he spoke.
There was a recital of names.  A checklist.
Isaac.  Aunt Ruth.  Sarah.  Mama.  Walter.  Hitler.
Family, friend, enemy.
They were all under the covers with him, and at one point, he appeared to be struggling with himself.  "Nein," he whispered.  It was repeated seven times.  "No."
Liesel, in the act of watching, was already noticing the similarities between this stranger and herself.  They both arrived in a state of agitation on Himmel Street.  They both nightmared (Zusak 205-206).

The students presented their tableaux photography and explained the rationale behind their choices.  

For my digitally manipulated image, I provided a backdrop for their tableau.  Using the Creative Commons search feature, I found images of a basement and a mattress that were public domain.  I then inserted my studenst into the setting of a dank, black-and-white basement.  Liesel is in the right foreground, staring at Max who lies on the bed.  Above the characters is the corresponding quotation from The Book Thief.  

Standard 3 for language arts in the CT curriculum guidelines demands that students gain an understanding of perspective and point of view and that they apply it in their writing.  Often, as a motivating prompt, instructors will guide students to imagine what it would be like to be another person, to empathize with a character and attempt to view the world from the character's perspective.  Though such a strategy can be effective without the use of visuals, it seems clear to me that creating a digitally manipulated image, in which students literally become the characters, magnifies the students' likelihood of truly rotating their perspectives.  For an assignment, I would  have them create their own digitally manipulated image and write an accompanying narrative.  The assignment demands that they transform the original text's third person narration into first person narration from the point of view of one of the characters in the image.  The assignment could be shortened by having them respond to an image that I have created in advance.