I have chosen Natasha Caruana as the photographer who I feel I would select to exhibit along side my own work under our chosen theme ‘ The Endless Cycle’.
There are many reasons for this;
the main one being that upon viewing her projects I feel there is a strong cyclic theme of love, hate, betrayal and loneliness.
Her three main projects available to us are titled:
‘Portraits of the other women’
‘Married men’
Fairytale for sale’
I would describe Caruana as a photographer not afraid to use her camera to confront difficult subjects;
embedded in her projects is suggestions of the impact of love and lust on women’s emotions.
On one level her work can be seen as a typology of adulterers, but that only scratches the surface.
Deeper meanings in her work expose a complex investigation into the boundaries and repetition of human emotion.
A perfect example of an endless cycle.
I feel human emotion is the epitome of a true endless cycle and it exists in each and every one of us, you will see how this is embedded in the work I have produced.
Caruana creates her work combining found images, snapshots and staged pictures.
Her projects come together to compromise three challenging bodies of work all dealing with similar issues.
Fairytale for Sale consists of photographs taken from online adverts of brides wearing redundant wedding dresses.
Their faces have been scratched out or obscured, and the dresses, symbols of an idealized view of western life, are reduced to commodities.
The Other Woman is a more conventional photographic project.
The pictures portray women who have experienced affairs with married men and the project was inspired by Caruana’s own personal experience.
Her other series ‘The Maried Men’ is the photographic part of her work which depict some of the 80 dates she went on with married men, each met on internet dating sites.
The identities of the men aren’t revealed, and the photographs captured clandestinely and adhere to the snapshot aesthetic.
The work questions the motives of the men.
More interestingly for me, it also questions Caruanas motives.
My work is an exploration of the cycles of human emotion, and an attempt at studying the conventional taught physical signs we learn to associate with a given emotion.
I was interested in looking at the ways we understand each other’s feelings by an exchange of a physical expression.
I found various scientific and psychological studies online, which look at the relationships between sleep and emotion, some concluding that sleep is the most emotional human state and linking such ideas to dreams and nightmares.
Others state sleep is the only emotionless human state.
And some argue sleep is the most emotional state, however the only state where such emotions aren’t visible.
I looked at the work of Luke Stephenson. And his series ‘spectacle wearing folk’, these images inspired the washed out tonality and composition of my images.
The overall aesthetic I chose for my final images was purposely done to induce a dream like feeling and ensure the main focus of the images was the facial expressions and or lack of them. I found an article online which revealed that 80% of people claimed they dreamt in colour, whist the remaining percentage claimed to only ever dream in black and white, however in an experiment where sleepers were woken mid sleep and asked to select colours from a chart, soft pastel colours were most frequently chosen, this reinforced the appropriateness of my editing choice.
My portraits are paired with images of myself sleeping which I captured using a remote shutter release set to take a 2 photographs every 10 minutes whilst I slept.
After much experimentation I found both the portraits and the images of me sleeping worked best with the absence of clothing, as the colours and styles of my attire seemed to distract from the expressions and altered the mood of the images.
In terms of exhibiting these images, I would display my prints relatively small directly on top of one another in a vertical line. My reasoning for the small size prints is that the images, particularly ones of me sleeping are quite intimate so the small print size would encourage viewers to get closer and perhaps educe a feeling of discomfort.
Frames and mounts would be minimal to reinforce the theme of endless cycle and recycling. The wall would be white as to make the images almost appear to fade away into the interior of the room, mimicking the irrational sensations of dreams.
I have also captured some sound clips of me sleeping which include texts and notifications coming through on my mobile phone as well as other ambient sounds. I feel these sounds give information and more substance to the images, I would like these sounds to be played alongside the images through headsets so that no other sounds in the room interfered.
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