final project

duties of the diva 

this series reflects on the routine, or process of the “diva”. she dresses up to feel good about herself, but is never truly satisfied. no matter how she wears her hair or changes her outfit. there’s a point in the photos where you can see her “shift” and break down. she removes her makeup, only to feel numb and empty, ready to start the cycle all over again tomorrow. this is a character i am playing, but it takes inspiration from old patterns and mindsets that i used to have.

for these photos, i took self-portraits and sat in front of a blank background in order to have the focus be on me, the subject. the choice to present this series in black and white to highlight the tone and composition more. the lack of color further adds to the theme of solitude and regressing back to a state that is insecure and even self-pitying.

  1. pleased, for now
f/4.5 – ISO400 – 1/25 shutter

2. who am i kidding

f/4.5 – ISO 400 – 1/30 shutter

3. why bother

f/4.5 – ISO 400 – 1/30 shutter

4. don’t do this, not again

f/4.5 – ISO 400 – 1/30 shutter

5. succumbing to the feeling

f/4.5 – ISO 400 – 1/30 shutter

6. remove and digress 

f/4.5 – ISO 400 – 1/30 shutter

7. accepting the defeat

f/4.5 – ISO 400 – 1/30 shutter

8. look forward to tomorrow

f/4.5 – ISO 400 – 1/30 shutter

 

project 5 – perception – cohesive series

ALICE IN WONDERLAND SYNDROME

AWS is a rare neurological condition that can temporarily cause bodily, environmental, or/and time distortion. It can affect everyone differently. Lasting for minutes, or even hours at a time, a sufferer might feel smaller, or bigger than the environment around them. Or, they might feel as if everything around them is shifting around and feels bigger or smaller than reality. Time can also feel warped. These episodes are not the result of hallucinations or a visual impairment, it is a neurological effect that changes one perception of their own self and/or the area around them. Commonly happens at night. Also known as Todd’s Syndrome as it was identified by John Todd in the 1950s.

In this series, I focus on the size perception of one’s body and feeling small/shrunken (micropsia).

f/2.3 – ISO100 – 1/60 shutter
f/2.4 – ISO 100 – 1/60 shutter
f2.4 – ISO100 – 1/50 shutter
f/2.4 – ISO100 – 1/60 shutter

resources on AWS:

article 1

article 2 

article 3

project 5 – perception – oliver sacks

“The rest of us, born sighted, can scarcely imagine such confusion. For we, born with a full complement of senses, and correlating these, one with the other, create a sight world from the start, a world of visual objects and concepts and meanings. When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection. But when Virgil opened his eye, after being blind for forty-five years-having had little more than an infant’s visual experience, and this long forgotten-there were no visual memories to support a perception, there was no world of experience and meaning awaiting him. He saw, but what he saw had no coherence. His retina and optic nerve were active, transmitting impulses, but his brain could make no sense of them; he was, as neurologists say, agnosic.”

  • Oliver Sacks, To See and Not See, 1993