Reflecting pain via a dream theme is proving to be extremely challenging. I found a spurt of inspiration this evening and am posting a few images for feedback purposes from my classmates. I am definitely going for an abstract theme it would seem – something so out of my comfort zone. The titles are purely working titles at this stage. I may omit them altogether for the assignment.
I’m really struggling with this assignment at the moment. See my initial planning post here. Having been advised by my tutor to take the surrealist route to interpret pain is definitely more difficult than I thought originally. I’m further hampered by the fact that I have taken quite a few images on my new camera but can’t process them in Lightroom as my new camera is not compatible with Lightroom 5 and my computer is not compatible with Lightroom 6, so I’m waiting for a new computer. I have managed to download a few images from the new camera through Nikon Capture, but it doesn’t have the same post-processing finesse that Lightroom does.
I think I’m at the stage where I need some constructive feedback from my fellow students and other photogs, so I’m going to post a few images that I am toying with at the moment. Hopefully I’m on the right track here.
I identified my topic for Assignment 2 (Photographing the unseen) just shortly after receiving my course materials at the end of April. I had knee replacement surgery looming on the horizon and knowing that I would be mobility challenged for a few months and therefore decided to take “Pain” as my assignment topic as I would be experiencing a lot of it. I would be my own research guinea pig.
Just a few days prior to surgery date I started keeping a diary, jotting down my thoughts and feelings and occurrences that happened during the day. I took this along to the hospital with me and continued the process for quite a while afterwards while recovering at home. As I looked down at my operated leg after removing the dressing one day, my title of my project came to me “60 points of pain”. I had 30 staples in my leg. I identified various objects that I wanted and had photographed and ran this by my tutor. I also mentioned to her that at one stage during my recovery I was experiencing really weird dreams – almost surrealist in nature. She has encouraged me to take this route for my project. This is going to be something totally out of the box for me and will be extremely risky and will leave me feeling very exposed as I will now have to put more of myself physically into the photos than I had initially intended. I do not like photographing myself, but I suppose it will be good practice for Assignment 3.
I’ve identified a few photographers to research: Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Duane Michals, Edmund Teske, Diane Fenster and Grahame Weinbren. I would like to stay away from using Photoshop to create any of my images so this is really going to be a challenge for me. Thank goodness I have a new camera that can make multiple exposures, because I think I will be using that technique quite a bit – something new to learn and experiment with.
Lynda Kuit Photography - Context & Narrative 