self portraits

I began by using a tripod and remote shutter release to photograph myself physically portraying emotions.
I am interested in the physical displays of emotion and how we are conditioned to recognise these, Eg a smile indicates emotions linked to happiness and joy, whereas gritted teeth for example, would indicate anger or frustration.
These associations of mood and facial expression are built into us as we grow up and a lot of our understanding and reading of another humans emotion depends mainly on there physical display.

I stood against a plain white wall and decided after initial test shots to remove my top as the colour/style/fabric ect of clothing seemed to interfere with the reading of the emotion I was attempting to present. 
I wanted the images to look quite minimal as not to distract from the facial expression so did everything in my power to ensure they were as 'stripped back' as possible.

In the editing stage I played with levels in the R,G,B channels as well as altering the lightness of the image and adding noise, I also used the dodge tool with a sponge effect brush to make the images look dreamy and a little older. The idea of making them look older came from an earlier experiment with re-photographing images from my mums family photo albums. At that point I was considering finding links and parallels between my facial expressions as a child and or those I could find in older images of my mum when she was a similar age to me now.
I then considered using these, amongst other images as stimuli to help generate the emotions I was attempting to record on my face in the self portraits.
In other edits I have increased the contract and amount of white in the image in an attempt to almost isolate the facial features form the face.

This effect may be something I will have to reconsider the significance of as the project develops and I question the relevance of making the stimuli a visual part of my end result.