In
Annie Dillard's "Seeing"
she says that "Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls."
She talks about how we are strangers to the darkness, and how shadows spread
and deepen and that, even after thousands of years, we are still
"strangers to darkness." This is an idea that I wanted to convey in
my Music Mosaic. I wanted to explore the unknown, the fearful, the dark matters
of the world. I picked Bjork's discordant song Dark Matter as the platform to
build my mosaic. I drew inspiration for my photographs from my first year at
BYU, when I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and almost failed out. I would
often find myself wondering around Provo at 2 in the morning - scared, alone
and confused.
I
wanted to simulate what those late night walks were like in the best most
understandable way possible. However, it's hard to make the overwhelming
feeling of confusion and paranoia understandable. It's hard to use the concrete
to describe the abstract. So, I chose a song those sounds like it shouldn't
work, and yet somehow does. Bjork uses a made up jabber of lyrics to punctuate
the moody music in her song. She set out to write a song to explain the
unexplainable, it sounds as if it shouldn't work and yet it somehow does work
together to create, in my opinion, one of the best representations of pure fear
and confusion.
Mixing
these ideas together, I went out after work one night in an attempt to capture
this idea that, by definition, couldn't be captured. I wanted to find the most
concrete way I could show the darkness of Dark Matter, and to capture the
"presence of the unseen," and to just represent how I felt my first
year here in order to express myself better. The first image opens with the
side of a building at night, there's a high contrast because of the flash of
the camera, like the first note of Dark Matter, this image sets the tone of the
rest of the mosaic, without giving away what the rest will be like.
The
remaining images show a combination of walls, parking lots, benches and the
night sky. I used techniques commonly attributed to William Hope, a hoax
photographer who convinced people he had actual photographs of ghosts.[1]
Shadowy figures stand menacingly in the
frame, smoke from sticks of incense mixed with the camera's flash create ghostly
masses, the use of double exposure creates transparent figures just out of
sight.
I
wanted to create a sense of unease and paranoia with my photographs, because I
wanted to expose everyone to the feelings that I, and likely many others, get
while walking around alone at night. Seeing out of the corner of your eye what
might be a person, but is likely just your own shadow or a trick of your mind.
But the idea is already there, that there might be someone just outside of your
field of vision waiting for you to turn away.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hope_(paranormal_investigator)
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