Image idea experiment 2
For my second experiment with my images, I decided to work with clusters of objects in my room. Spaces where I kept a lot of things hoarded, or put away. Because for me, you can find out a whole lot more about me from these little piles of things in my room, and whats in my wardrobe, than you can from just glancing into my room. Its like these objects are a self-portrait. So I took pictures of inside my wardrobe, baskets of bits and bobs on my bedside table, inside my cupboard etc.
But then I thought about how I wanted to explore the discovery of identity as well as questioning it. So I thought about the questions I’ve often asked myself when I look in the mirror, especially on the bad days. One that shouted out to me was “Do I know you?” because ive asked myself this several times before. Instead of digitally adding the text on top of the image like I did for the last ones, I decided to try to re-photograph these areas of my room through bits of paper with the words cut out. This is what turned out:
I couldn’t really get the focus right and it was proving difficult to hold the paper in front of the lens and take a half decent picture. When I did get it focus on the objects I was photographing, I didn’t particularly like how much the word blurred. Although you could still make out what it said, the impact of the work was just so low, I hated it. So another idea scrapped, I moved onto trying it a different way.
The piece of paper I cut the words out on was just a normal plain piece of printer paper so light could easily be shined through it. So I opened up one of the original images of all my junk and put it on full screen, closed my curtains and turned the light off. I then taped the piece of paper with the cut out writing onto my laptop screen. Now because the paper let light through, the image was still visible through it, and then through the cut out letters, the image was really clear. I really liked the contrast it created, as if these aspects (the stuff in my wardrobe) is masked and blurred by a façade we put on sometimes, and then really looking at ourselves and asking questions about who we are shines a light on it and makes it clear to us.
But again, I still felt like what I was creating ended up looking too much like an advertisement. I think it was because I was focusing on putting the text on top of the images instead of sitting back and really thinking about how I wanted it presented. So again, with this idea scrapped, I moved onto something else.
