This isn't photography related but I'm happy!
♥ Two more full uni days left till the Christmas break!
♥ Possible TKU night, if not, London for a friend's birthday!
♥ One of my best friends 22nd birthday house party in Chatham!
♥ Seeing a rather special boy in my life, staying a couple of nights and he's taking me to a German Christmas Market which I adore... SO EXCITED!
♥ Pub night back home to see my lovely home lovelies and JO-FACE!
♥ Christmas!!!
Hells yeah. Happy!
Monday 6 December 2010
Thursday 2 December 2010
Playful.
I have fallen in love with a short experimental art film that I discovered on DeviantART and it made me think about my project of extremes again...
You can read about my own project here, if you haven’t already...
My Extremes...
It started with these three images on the idea of metaphorical drowning... which oddly enough, came out of a breakup I had last year.
My idea of experimenting with and photographing my extremes came out of two things; the desire to be able to create work that might make people grasp, even for a minute, why some people might be interested in more unconventional sexual practises (and for it to become not such a scary thing...) and the desire to explore myself and the world, as I do with all my work.
If there’s one thing I learnt through my idea is that I am not a freak. There is no such thing as normal, but I am not weird like I remember being scared that I might be about the age of ten. I found the things I do and experience though my body are really universal; everyone does these things, and the weird part? Not many people speak about it, and this is what I wanted to focus on the most. I found myself in discussions with people about habits we had as kids, and I loved finding out people used to do similar as me!
It seems as children we’re allowed to be more inquisitive about our body and our world, so when we do strange and experimental things no one really notices, it’s supposed to be part of learning... and maybe that’s why people talk about it less when we grow up? For me, that’s how I relate it to the world of kink... to me a lot of kink is about being playful with yourself and other people, exploring boundaries and sensations... and if you think about it in this way, it is possibly the most human and normal thing we can do. How can we learn if we don't explore?
I think as we grow up it seems less and less acceptable to be able to experiment and have fun with the world, and for me, it almost seems like the world of kink/unconventional sexual practice is the adult version. It shouldn’t be viewed as unclean. I found that I never liked much fetish photography, it always seemed so cold and unfeeling to me. It felt disconnected, and so I didn’t feel for it. My idea was to create work that could be relatable to... if people were to see my ‘weird’ habits and ‘extremes’ they could realise they do the same things as I do... and they can be such simple things! I went to Centre Parks for a family holiday when I was twelve, and I made a game in the swimming pool of going straight to the hot swimming pool to the freezing cold ‘plunge’ pool. It was simply experimenting with temperature, which isn’t weird at all, but the same thing can be said for a lot of the kink world (well, at least, for me)... it’s about experimenting with sensations your body and mind can go through... and it’s such a human thing to do!
As I went further into my project it became far less about making people grasp the idea of unconventional sexual experimentation and became more about simply the experience of being human.
I found I need to feel certain extremes in my life, which is why I fell in love with the film I posted. From what I can gather, it’s mostly about losing a pregnancy, but to me it seems the woman is experimenting with sensations to clear her mind and make her feel okay again... which is largely what I do too... it seems to be the way we, as humans, try to connect to the world around us, to make us feel alive, or free, or to help us forget. I think it's a universal need, we just experience it in different ways.
e m b r i o - jsmonzani.com from Jean-Sebastien Monzani on Vimeo.
You can read about my own project here, if you haven’t already...
My Extremes...
It started with these three images on the idea of metaphorical drowning... which oddly enough, came out of a breakup I had last year.
My idea of experimenting with and photographing my extremes came out of two things; the desire to be able to create work that might make people grasp, even for a minute, why some people might be interested in more unconventional sexual practises (and for it to become not such a scary thing...) and the desire to explore myself and the world, as I do with all my work.
If there’s one thing I learnt through my idea is that I am not a freak. There is no such thing as normal, but I am not weird like I remember being scared that I might be about the age of ten. I found the things I do and experience though my body are really universal; everyone does these things, and the weird part? Not many people speak about it, and this is what I wanted to focus on the most. I found myself in discussions with people about habits we had as kids, and I loved finding out people used to do similar as me!
It seems as children we’re allowed to be more inquisitive about our body and our world, so when we do strange and experimental things no one really notices, it’s supposed to be part of learning... and maybe that’s why people talk about it less when we grow up? For me, that’s how I relate it to the world of kink... to me a lot of kink is about being playful with yourself and other people, exploring boundaries and sensations... and if you think about it in this way, it is possibly the most human and normal thing we can do. How can we learn if we don't explore?
I think as we grow up it seems less and less acceptable to be able to experiment and have fun with the world, and for me, it almost seems like the world of kink/unconventional sexual practice is the adult version. It shouldn’t be viewed as unclean. I found that I never liked much fetish photography, it always seemed so cold and unfeeling to me. It felt disconnected, and so I didn’t feel for it. My idea was to create work that could be relatable to... if people were to see my ‘weird’ habits and ‘extremes’ they could realise they do the same things as I do... and they can be such simple things! I went to Centre Parks for a family holiday when I was twelve, and I made a game in the swimming pool of going straight to the hot swimming pool to the freezing cold ‘plunge’ pool. It was simply experimenting with temperature, which isn’t weird at all, but the same thing can be said for a lot of the kink world (well, at least, for me)... it’s about experimenting with sensations your body and mind can go through... and it’s such a human thing to do!
As I went further into my project it became far less about making people grasp the idea of unconventional sexual experimentation and became more about simply the experience of being human.
I found I need to feel certain extremes in my life, which is why I fell in love with the film I posted. From what I can gather, it’s mostly about losing a pregnancy, but to me it seems the woman is experimenting with sensations to clear her mind and make her feel okay again... which is largely what I do too... it seems to be the way we, as humans, try to connect to the world around us, to make us feel alive, or free, or to help us forget. I think it's a universal need, we just experience it in different ways.
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