My idea works on the surrealist idea that by exploring my personal extremes, I could perhaps let others have a glimpse of a world they hadn’t understood before (that of sexual experimentation and opening your mind and body up to new experiences). The photographs themselves will be a test... they won’t necessarily make sense to everyone, like a punctum in a photograph from Camera Lucida is piercing to some but not others. I’m working on the idea that the surrealists used... “Surrealism emphasised artistic processes whereby the imaginary can be recorded through automatic writing or drawing which would thus offer insights into the world of ‘thought’ and therefore disrupt taken-for-granted perceptions and frames of reference.”
My work is also autobiographical as I am working through my extremes and intensities, something I’ve taken for granted in my life for years, odd private habits that I want to explore through my camera so that a transformation can take place... “Transformation of turning an uneventful private, perhaps secretive event in one’s life into something with intimate significant that affected others when looked upon”. I’ve also looked into how we become “readers” and “users” of photographs, but how through personal photographs users can become readers of their own photographs, and self psycho-analysis can take place by having to read our own photograph. This idea really excites me, as I’m exploring my own personal boundaries, learning things about myself and hoping to also make people understand a world they haven’t before. My extremes connects to many parts of me, and the camera comes into the photograph almost like a prosthetic limb, simply becoming an extension of myself and thus the photograph still contains “truth” (I’m not going to start on the massive philosophical debate of the idea of truth right now!) as the camera is part of the process of my extremes. I aim to use the camera as a part of myself to take the work outside my boundaries and make it universal. The camera will act as a mechanical eye... “My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.”
I took a photograph a few months ago that started this idea. I originally took the photograph as I use my photography as a form of therapy and I had a bad breakup that crushed me at the time and a line from my favourite poet really helped me get through it; “If the window is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing river water” - Richard Siken... and so I created work that helped me and I also became really interested in drowning and asphyxiation, realising part of why I loved making the photograph so much was how connected I felt through it and the physical intensity I had to go through to create it.
Then it suddenly dawned on me the other day that this fascination and experimentation with extremes that my project is based on has been with me for years and I suddenly remembered a really weird habit that I had when I was much much younger... I can’t really remember my exact age but it was an odd habit that I had for years probably during junior school and much before when I was very young.
After I woke up or before I went to sleep I would quite often make myself a cocoon out of my duvet, trying to seal myself inside my duvet as much as I could so that I couldn’t really breathe very well, or was at least very hot inside. I was an incredibly imaginative kid and I’d imagine that I was in the process of being born. However I wasn’t being born from a womb, I’d imagine I was being born from a kind of weird white shell in a white lab where lots of others were being born at the same time as me. I’d very slowly start to escape from my “womb” opening my duvet up tiny bits at time, allowing a tiny bit of air in and making myself really gasp for the air. It’s odd because as a kid I wasn’t really thinking about the idea of asphyxiation and indeed I’d doubt at that age I even knew the word, but I was definitely experimenting with breath play and making myself deliberately have not as much oxygen as I needed and I liked doing this. I’d do it very slowly and gap by gap till I was fully “born” out of my duvet. It never really occurred to me when I was younger how odd this habit was and I hadn’t actually thought about it for years till I remembered it the other day and thought “Fuck, have I been obsessed with asphyxiation since THEN?!” haha.
I was then further weirded out when I realised the white shell type thing I was being born out of was very reminiscent of the Lady Gaga Bad Romance video!
So yesterday I spent a lazy Saturday looking through some of my old books. I’ve had the Taschen book ‘1000 record covers’ for years since my early teens, and seeing as my project is going into a surrealist area I remembered that there were three album covers I’d always been fascinated by within the book that I remembered as being surreal... not really remembering what the record covers looked like (I haven’t opened the book in a couple of years before yesterday) I decided to find them again. I was rather weirded out by myself when I realised all three of the album covers featured drowning or water!!!
It seems the further I go into this project the more I realise I’ve been reading and interested in these topics for years; without even really realising!
And I’m also discovering what a freak I am along the way, yay!
