'SILL FILM PORTRAITS'

27.09.2022 / 12.01.2023

These Photographs are part of an assignment for the class Moving Image Theory. We had to produce a still film or film still according to the Klein diagram.

When thinking about how to create a movie-like scenery, I came up with the idea of using my special effects makeup skills to give it a gruesome and very tense feeling. I knew that I couldn’t afford it to take too much time just for realistic looking wounds, so it had to be something simple, but messy and at the same time not less vigorous in any way.

But apart from these facts about the conscious part of creation, I found more and more unconscious reasons why I did it exactly like that.

Pretty much at the beginning I already made the connection to it being part of my healing journey in art. The deeper thoughts took some time, and occurred whenever I worked on or looked at the photos.

It’s not only healing of what may seem obvious when looking at the pictures. Sure, sexual assault plays a big role, but it’s also healing from being silenced, healing from loneliness - healing from all the dark fragments of my life.

In this series you can see many things.

You can see fear and emptiness in the way I look in the first picture. But in the second one, there’s a lot of strength and power, and the only fear you may notice is the fear in yourself. Because of this, maybe even possessed-feeling stare. Then in the last one has more of something dissociative, looking away from probably horrible things going on in the part of the picture that’s not there.

Maybe an appropriate hyperbola: The 1st one looks like you’re about to witness me being killed, the 2nd one definitely looks like I’m about to kill you, and the 3rd one as if I just witnessed someone else being killed.

Obviously this is not about literal death, but when we see it as the inner parts of me which died during these times, it’s not overstated/ exaggerated at all.

Also, when you look at it more abstractly, the series can also be seen as a looking back in time, being in the moment, and looking in the future. A huge topic in my personal life, because I struggle with being too much in the past or future. Either because of nostalgia about things that already happened, or because of excitement for the things that are about to come.

In the past semester and also the past one-and-a half-years, there was quite some growing regarding that.

In conclusion: even if the series can seem dark and depressing at first sight, what it actually represents for me is the recovery of this darkness, and that I’m traveling towards becoming the strongest version of myself.

Take the power back.