FOR YOU
HONESTLY it’s taken me a while to write this blog, this series is very important to me because it was inspired by someone who I will always love and respect. Unfortunately he and I are no longer together due to personal reasons and I’ve been finding it hard to write because it’s just difficult… So to start off this blog I just wanted to say...
THANK you to my Sunshine, for the happy times we shared together. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without you and I'm so lucky and grateful to have met you. I wish you the brightest future and the loveliest of life's, much love, your Moonlight.
SECOND YEAR / SEMESTER THREE
FOR YOU
FLASH forward from the end of 2013 to the beginning of 2015. 2014 was my gap year and it was time for me to go back to PSC to continue my bachelor degree. If you haven’t seen my previous posts, I decided to have a break because I felt like I didn’t have anything to say. I thought by taking a step back and living and breathing for a little while I would hopefully grow and experience and question things and have/felt something that would inspire me enough to create.
AND you know what, it worked.
SOMETHING I’ve always been curious about is love. It was something that scared me but also excited me. I’ve always wanted to be in a relationship but at the same time I’ve never wanted to be in one. I have two older sisters and growing up I had the privilege to watch them go through all of their relationships, some that went well and some that were horrible. I remember after years of listening to their arguments I decided “I don’t want to be in a relationship because the drama is not worth it.” But one of the things that happened to me in 2014 was that I found someone who would be worth it.
WHICH was exciting but frightening at the same time. Growing up I was exposed to couples like my parents and all my grandparents who had only ever been with each other for their entire lives, which is a really beautiful thing! However growing up with that I ended up putting pressure on myself, pressure that made me feel that if I was going to be with someone it was because I thought we could be together forever. Which is honestly a good and bad thing. It’s good because it meant I wouldn’t just throw a relationship away over one little fight, we seem to live in a time where everything is so easy and accessible that people are slowly becoming accustom to the idea that when something get’s hard or to difficult to deal with you just throw it away and move on… But anyways, on the other hand it was also a bad pressure because it comes to a point where you have to really think about if you should keep fighting for something or if it should come to an end. I’ve learnt that as hard and as awful as it may feel, it’s okay to be selfish. If you realise you’re not okay and that you need to step back there’s nothing wrong with that. And that’s why it’s hard, for me at least, because I just want people to be happy even if it sacrifices my own happiness— and that’s not always a good way to live…
OOPS I’m getting really off track (as usual) but back to the point… Overall I was frightened of love as much as I was excited by it. I realised that with all the happiness, butterflies and the starry eyes there comes this weird vulnerability. You’re opening yourself up to someone without knowing whether they’re going to reciprocate your feelings or not. You’re trusting this person to accept these feelings and not to hurt you, it’s this weird combination of trust and fragility which you don't really think of because of how this person is making you feel.
AND essentially that was what the folio ended up being about.
WHILST looking around on my hard drive for files related to this series, I found a document of my first brainstorm/stream of consciousness (or at least that I can find) for the folio. It was back when the series was first called “Wine Stained Shirt”. (And I’m just gonna say it now because I’m being honest, I was inspired by Taylor Swift’s song lyric “You’re still all over me like a wine stained dress I can’t wear anymore” and it’s because she’s the best and 1989 was a great album and now we can move on.)
CAN we also just take the time to acknowledge that I wrote "trying to catch sand/smoke (metaphor for time)" Good one me.
AFTER a while I began to workshop the idea and began to create some brainstorm images so that I could figure out a style.
LOOKING back I wish I continued with the style I was shooting Sophie in, creating images that looked quite raw in an actual environment, but instead I decided to try develop the studio styled images. I think I chose the studio setting because it was something I was interested in exploring, I hadn’t created a studio based folio before and my last two folios were heavily people based. I think I just wanted to focus on objects and a very minimalistic style…
…WHICH doesn’t really make much sense because of how human and emotional the idea was. I don’t know how I expected to create strong emotional images using the style I was experimenting with. I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea… Some people might be able to do it, but it wasn’t working for me at all.
WHAT I think is the most interesting part of the early stages of the work is that I didn’t want the work to be about myself at all. Even though it was about how I was feeling, I wanted it to be more about the feelings in general than about my specific experience.
BECAUSE of that I also originally intended the images to be about a heterosexual relationship, I even threw around the title “Boy Girl Burst” in the early stages. I thought that if I was to create images of a homosexual couple people would get more caught up in that than what I was trying to say. Thinking about that now I think it is quite presumptuous of me but it is also a warranted thought— Look at the film Brokeback Mountain for instance, when it was released (and even now really) (And I was guilty of this as well) people were more interested in talking about how shocking the idea of two gay cowboys were than actually talking about any of the deeper messages in the film! Unfortunately people get distracted by surface things like that and it stops them from looking any deeper. But I digress… All I wanted was for people to focus more about the emotions than anything else.
AND in hindsight I think that was a waste of time and to be honest it didn’t work at all. Instead of being worried that people weren’t going to get what I was saying I could’ve used that time to refine and strengthen my eventual style and what I was trying to say. I think by being worried and trying to disassociate myself from the emotions, it caused the work to suffer. I began creating boring work that just began to repeat itself and look bad! It began turning into something I wasn’t proud of and something that I was becoming less and less interested in trying to create. My aim was to make really emotional and honest work but instead I was draining it of any emotion at all!
ONE day however I decided to strip the whole idea back and tried to focus on what it was really about. Which was me and my emotions, plain and simple. So I decided to use the same language I was using in my studio images but put it in a personal and vulnerable setting.
AND I created this picture. These are the unedited and edited version of the photo that changed my series. I’m embarrassed to say that it took me about two months to finally wake up and create something good, but at least I got there!
ONE day at uni I met up with my very lovely and talented tutor, Katrin Koenning, and she helped steer me in the right direction. She agreed that the “raw” setting was much more powerful than the studio setting. Katrin introduced me to a photographed named Yavuz Erkan, spoiler alert he also ended up becoming my mentor in third year, and she showed me his series “Unorthodox Aphorisms” and it completely changed how I was creating images. I’ve already gushed to him about his work but it honestly made me look at how subtly you can communicate an idea.
I threw away the idea that the images weren’t going to be personal to me at all and I began to create soft images that were vulnerable but honest… Some of them worked but some of them didn’t but they were at least better than my studio images.
ANOTHER funny little thing was that I only wanted to use natural lighting, which was completely opposite to the studio lighting I had been using. I used the same corner of my room for every photo, it was where I got the nicest light and in my mind it suited the idea of the folio. Like I've said over and over, the idea was about vulnerability and trust and so a bedroom for me is a very personal place because it's where I think people are completely themselves. I see bedrooms as little representations of who we are, you typically fill it with things you like, things you want to look at, things that make you happy and a heart is sort of like a bedroom I suppose.. You let people in, hoping they'll respect and accept the little parts of you that you're showing... I don't know, maybe that sounds stupid... But for me it was important because it added that personal layer of vulnerability and being open to the images.
(I also woke up to that natural light every day and it was really lovely)
I remember I showed a photographer (who shall remain nameless) the images from this folio about a year after I had finished making it and he asked me why I didn't do the photos in a studio, I told him pretty much the same thing that I said above and he said "Well that doesn't matter, the images would look better with studio lighting, you should do them again" ...WELL.
THE annoying part of this however was that I had wasted most of the semester creating the studio images so I was quickly running out of time and conveniently I ended up getting really sick from a cold sore virus! Which was actually the worst because I was never exposed to the virus when I was younger and my immune system didn’t know how to fight it, so when I got it I GOT IT BAD. And when I say bad I MEAN BAD. I had sores all in my throat and in my mouth, it even spread onto my chin! I was sick/dead for nearly two weeks.
MID-WAY through the sickness though I forced myself to go into uni to hand in an assignment because I was worried my teachers wouldn’t believe me, and I remember seeing Katrin and she said “You should probably not be here, you should go home”.
IN this next photo you can see the beautiful cold sore on my chin, although I am grateful for this photo because it gave me one of the strongest images of the series as well.
AND oops, yes I did know I left that bandaid on... It's a metaphor... I did it on purpose...
BECAUSE I began doing these images pretty late I didn't leave myself much time for printing. WHICH IS SOMETHING THAT SEEMS TO BE A COMMON THEME WITH ME, I know, I'm the worst. And I know I keep promising scans of test prints and all of that stuff but I don't think I actually had much for this folio. Like I said I didn't give myself a lot of time but I do have a stressful story about printing....
SO as you can probably see from some of the outtakes/unedited versions of the images, a lot of them needed to be cropped into before I was happy with an image. The two pictures above are a great example of that. (Also beware we're going to be getting into some printing slang so stay with me). I'll start from the start, before you shoot your images you set a setting that determines how big your image files are going to be. So the images above were shot on a high setting which made them 3960pixels by 2640pixels which translates to a size of about 33cm x 22cm. And that's not too bad, you can print that at A4 pretty easy there will be no problem. But when you have to crop into the image you're eliminating a lot of those pixels and shrinking the image further down. So when I cropped the image it became the size of about 9.5cm x 14.3cm. And this HORRIFIED me, in hindsight I realise that the file would've still been 300ppi (pixels per inch) so I would've been able to drop that down and increase the size of the image without making much of a difference, but at the time I was still pretty not that great at printing and didn't realise I could do that. So I was TERRIFIED. How was I meant to scale up a 9.5cm image into a 21cm image without making the image look like shit!? I was so worried that the images would turn our blurred and horrible, I remember I saw Sophie one day and was like "WHAT CAN I DO?! HELP ME?!" And bless her heart but Sophie was like "I don't know what you've done to your files... I don't think this is okay See" AND I WAS THROWN INTO A HEADSPIN OF FEAR AND TORMENT. I was SO worried and pretty much convinced at this point that my prints would come out ruined and destroyed and that my files would be useless and that I would have to shoot all over again! It was actually terrible and I was very stressed. Instead of asking anybody else for advice I decided to submit my prints anyway just to see what would happen. I had to wait 2 or 3 days before I got to see them and it was so stressful, I was considering reshooting everything but hallelujah when I went to go pick the prints up they were actually fine and good!
MY freakout was for nothing! One of the workers in the print shop, her name was Kat, asked me why I was so relieved to see that my prints weren't ruined. I told her about the size and everything and she told me about the PPI trick and from that moment on everything was okay-- That was actually a pretty anti-climatic story, I'm sorry for that.
FLASH FORWARD a couple of days to my presentation day, I was one of the earliest presenters because on the same day I was flying to Queensland with my friend Davina to visit my other friend Gabby and her boyfriend Andrew, for Gabby's birthday! So my presentation went pretty smooth and well, I remember my teacher Dan had some criticism that I understood-- it was mainly about the prints-- but I also remember Hoda was on the panel! (Hoda became my art major teacher) And she really liked the work, which I was proud of, I remember there was a part where she stood up for me and I was like "Yasssss Hoda"!
AFTER my presentation I was disappointed I didn't get to stick around to see everyone else's folios but at this point I was just really excited to go away on a holiday.
EXCITINGLY by the end of that year I also submitted this series to ignant, an online art publication, and was fortunate enough to get published on there! And then I got republished on there as one of their top 10 submissions! And so all of that was really exciting as well! If you go into the For You section of my website there are links at the bottom of the page where you can check those out!
OVERALL I'm really happy with this folio, it's something I still really love and I'm still proud of it. Of course like any other project there would be some things I would change, but this is probably the first folio I was actually proud of.
MY next post is going to be about my next folio/book called "Groundhog Day" ... I have mixed feelings about that folio so you'll be excited to see me judge myself on that one! And excitingly! I actually have a huge folder of test prints, rough drafts, brainstorming and EVERYTHING so get ready for a lot of messily written hand notes and just mess next time! (Hopefully next time won't take me as long as this took me!)
Thank you for reading this, if you actually got to the end, I hope you have a good day.
SEB
UPDATE: While I was looking through pictures for stuff to do with my next blog post I came across some old photos of test prints and presentation day that I had missed! The selection I presented had more images in it than the selection on my website mainly because for our assessment we needed a certain number of images to submit. Which was understandable but also inconvenient because I felt like the series had to be quite small and gentle, due to the subject matter, so I created some "filler" images so that I had enough to submit.
SO not a very exciting reason... Sorry.
I also recently changed the portrait of Justin from the balloon head one to the hair swept one because it felt like it fitted better with the series and I only just uncovered it recently! I think it works better as well because I like the idea of having him appear within the bedroom, inside my space and impacting the environment, as opposed to only just walking in and still being on the outside.. Mainly because he was within my space and impacting it! He wasn't on the outside anymore, otherwise why would I be making this series..?
