Project Explaination: the role of photography in contemporary culture

For this project my concept was to take a look at contemporary photography as a form of exploitation. With new digital media it becomes easier to digitize,manipulate and upload photos to databases like websites, facebook etc. When you put your images/ artwork on the web they become exploitable, anyone has access to them. I made myself homeless to really send the exploitation theme a little further
      So my process started with a photo-shoot of myself  holding some cardboard signs, standing on the corner, looking all homeless. I wore different clothing so at first glance it might appear to be different people, but with contemporary photography taking a closer look is always a good idea. I layered the top photo as the background, put it in a gray-scale, took the backpack out of the second picture and used that as the 2nd layer, took my figure out of the 2nd picture and used it as the 3rd layer, then i took one of my paintings from my website and used it as the 4th layer. All images from the layers had their edges refined, and were scaled or skewed to some degree. Levels were adjusted to all layers, and opacity was adjusted on the 4th layer(painting). I did some cloning to add some better looking shadows, Because the dodge tool didnt give the right look.