The red light of the hidden darkroom at the end of the H hall in Plant City High School creates mysterious shadows on the high cheekbones of Keaunia Kaa’a’s face. It was in that enigmatic corner that the senior art student created a portrait of luminescence and a beacon of hope in her photograph, “Love Conquers All.” The work took overall winner in the Frameworks of Tampa Bay contest out of 77 submissions.
Kaa’a steps out of the quiet haven into a classroom buzzing with art students. The low droning of a beat-up hairdryer murmurs in the background as one of the students dries a painting. Others chat while finishing their pieces.
“I thought it was a joke,” Kaa’a said about her win.
There was a good reason she didn’t think the award was hers: the contest organizers called to inform her on April Fools’ Day. She received the voicemail while she was working in the deli at Publix. When she called back, the organizer’s voicemail said she was out of the office until January. It wasn’t until Kaa’a was told by the school’s college and career counselor, Sherrie Mueller, that she realized it was all true.
“I knew the picture was good, but not amazing,” Kaa’a said.
The organizers beg to differ.
“The sincere emotions between the two people in the photograph and how they were reflected with the interactions between each other spoke to the complexity of it,” Frameworks CEO Jessica Muroff said. “It really was a beautiful moment in a photograph.”
The original print is hanging in the Frameworks office.
“It’s amazing to think that other people can see what I can see,” Kaa’a said. “At some point, they saw it with no captions. They saw love in the picture. And if someone is going through something difficult, they can see what my grandma would see.”
Kaa’a was inspired by her great-grandma, who was diagnosed with cancer. The black-and-white portrait shows a delicate girl with a scarf wrapped around her head nestled against a boy in the shadows.
“(My grandma) cried for a long time (when she saw it),” Kaa’a said. “She was mostly proud for putting myself out there. I’m a conservative picture-taker. I’ll show them to friends and family, but not contests or something to be put on a billboard. When you put it out there, it can be picked at.”
It was one of her models, Luis Arellono, who encouraged the shy talent to enter her photograph in the Frameworks contest after they looked through thirty-some Canon Rebel shots to pick the masterpiece. She entered the photograph the day she took it — and the day it was due.
Another inspiration was her concentration: Disney versus reality. Last year, her concentration was chaos, but she always found herself going back to the subject of princesses and fairy tales. So she made sure her senior concentration would reflect her natural interest. She found a way to fuse her concentration with cancer. And she chose to use black and white to reflect the negative reality of cancer.
“Princesses are definitions of beauty,” Kaa’a said. “So I wanted (my grandma) to look at something and see, ‘If that’s beautiful, then so am I.’”
Contact Amber Jurgensen at ajurgensen@plantcityobserver.com.