Photography- Final Images. Until the End

After spending a lot of time thinking about what to do, I finally came up with a 3 part story which I have named, 'Until the End'.  I have used 3 sheets of Mountboard to present my work and 72 5x5in photographs. I knew that when I was given the theme I wanted to be creative and come up with an alter ego effect , using colour to enhance mood and emotion. I felt that by documenting how I felt when I was going through a rough time, it helped me to go to the extreme lengths through my photography to come up with interesting images. At my lowest point I felt like I was plummeting deep into a downward spiral of depression and anxiety . I decided to use my experience to create a vision of my journey. Each A1 mounted selection of photographs has its own section of a story and it reads left - right.

My first series of images is trying to find out who I am. Once I started to fall into a black hole of confusion, I didn't recognize the person reflected in the mirror. I could not understand why that wasn't my reflection and why it didn't look like me. I  then decided to take photos of myself to reassure myself that I am, me. Once looking at the images, I recognized some of them to be me, but there was still this blurry vision of someone else. I arranged the photos starting with the ones where I recognized myself then added in the images that I couldn't relate to, this was difficult to do as I was in every photograph. By the end of this section I was feeling smothered and couldn't breathe, so I added an image to suggest that feeling.

 

By the time I arranged my second series of images , I was aiming to display a heightened sense of anxiety and feeling trapped so I edited the images using the 'lomo' filter on my smartphone. The images in this section represent a deeper sense of depression, I purposely made the images darker than the first series to add effect to a deeper, darker mood. The first image consists of the hands, of the people in my family, they are positioned in a circle to provide the feeling of strangulation. I will say at this point that I love my family, more than anything ,but when I felt as though I couldn't breathe, I felt suffocated by everything and everyone. Included within this series of images are stones from the front of my house, this is to represent feeling trapped and unable to leave the house. The shoe is the first air freshener I bought for my car, which may seem odd, but it is there to symbolize the aggression and confusion I have felt while driving, the image has a dark range of colours throughout to enhance the deep emotion felt. The final image in this series, is of a timer I have in the house. I have always felt that a timer is quite intimidating as it is putting pressure on a situation , when it runs out, its gone. I used this to provide the sense of running out of time.

For my third series of images , I used the 'lomo' editing filter twice on each image to add a further sense of darkness and despair. The images are not as clear due to the overpowering colours which I am very pleased with. The first image is again, the hands of my family but closer together to give a sense of added pressure and deeper suffocation, The second image is representing the feeling of drowning and feeling helpless. One of my favourite images in this series has to be the mirror reflection, which Is on the second last row. The feeling of anger and anxiety had built up rapidly at this point and the confusion had increased also. The reflection in the mirror appeared to be angry but I didn't understand how that was my reflection, did I really look like that? in the last stage everything was out of control, I couldn't understand what had happened or where to go. I had no idea how to fix things so I just lay down to rest.... until the end.