Writing is difficult. I am constantly perplexed at how easily my peers write with such grace and eloquence. Their writings stand alongside their practice, embellish it, justify it. Their writings give their work purpose and reason. To write in this manner, or to attempt to as I am doing here, rather than to write as one would speak which is considered unprofessional and unacademic, is, to me, alien, bourgeois, and inefficient. I attribute my struggles to dyslexia, and often I would defend my inability to speak or write as others do, with my photographic artwork. I do not need to write, or to talk if my photographs can communicate for me. Photographs, for me and for so many others, offer a visual form of communication that transcends language. However, my ability to communicate through my imagery may not be as clear as I had hoped, hence by enrollment on this course to improve my ability to create meaningful imagery.
One of my most recent sources of inspiration over the past several years has been the video game Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) where in the protagonist struggles, like myself, to communicate. However, for the unknown protagonist of Dear Esther this is not the result of a lack of writing skills, it is due to the loss of the one with whom he wishes to communicate with: his, apparently, late wife. There is a sense of hope, however, for Dear Esther's protagonist as the game ends, when he dives from the top of a radio tower, signaling his ability to now communicate (Reynolds, 2014). With any luck, I will not need to jump from any masts, but with the help of Dear Esther, and other video games such as Silent Hill (Team Silent, 2001) where I draw inspiration, not to mention the uncanny works of photographers Gregory Crewdson and Jan Staller, I hope to move my work forward.
Currently my work represents a collection of my interests, Interests such as liminal spaces, the unknown, the uncanny and the surreal. As I create my images and research ideas and inspiration, I learn more about these topics and more about why it interests me. My work could be considered self-reflection, and perhaps even an exploration of my own mind. Perhaps one of the first sources of inspiration for me was the video game Silent Hill 2 (Team Silent, 2001) which I first experience about the age of twelve. The game had a lasting impression on me, causing me to replay many times, and begin to read about its production and its creators, and how they came to produce a game widely considered to be one of the best horror video games (Voted number 5 by Games Radar on their “Best Video Games of all time list” (Hurley, 2018), Appeared on PC Gamers “Best Horror Games” list (Roberts, Corbett, 2018) and a simple google search will reveal many similar articles). In the documentary Masahi Tsuboyama“Silent Hill 2: Making of” (Beuglet, 2001) Masahi Tsuboyama, Team Silent’s art director, describes how they wanted to create scenes that were designed to be both repulsive and attractive, while creating an “Aura of Mystery”. As a photographer I find it of great interest that in order to do this, Tsuboyama created photographs of desolate and disgusting places that would then be used as inspiration. The documentary also describes how team silent used unusually long pathways (for a video game) in tandem with effects to obscure the scene (The fog) in order to create a sense of isolation, these both have inspired the subject matter of much of my photography. Paths, and stairways in isolated locations often make me feel vulnerable and disconnected just like the fog and pathways in Silent Hill, yet also intrigued as to what might be at the end.
Bernard Perron makes multiple connections between Silent Hill and the works of H.P.Lovecraft in his book "Silent Hill: The Terror Machine" (2012), describing in one chapter (Perron, 2012,Pg 30) how the "Overall emotional dimensions at play" in Silent Hill 2 are a result of what Lovecraft would refer to as "Cosmic fear", that "A certain atmosphere of breathless and explainable dread of outer, unknown forces". This is clear to see in one particular scene in Silent Hill 2 that stayed with me long after playing, the butterfly room that appears early on in the game see's the main protagonist, James, in a bedroom full of moths and butterfly's. For me, without any further influence I was already terrified due to my own irrational fear of moths and butterfly's, however the room signifies so much more. The youtuber Obscura Lens produced a video (2016) detailing the symbolism behind this room, describing how the bedroom would be an important and familiar place for James as this would be the place of love and intimacy with his wife whom he is searching for. Moments later James finds himself, in a place that represents something so familiar to him, literally reaching into the unkown (A hole in the wall) in order to progress. For me this was one of the most dreadful and tense moments but also one of the most mysterious, I want to know why the hole was there and what was on the other side that makes James flinch as he reaches in, and so I take great inspiration from it. While my intentions are not to scare people with my work, I certainly do want them to feel at least somewhat unnerved but also drawn into the moment I have captured. Because of this in my work, I made the choice to never allow the voyeur to see the end of any pathway, there is never a clear destination, they often lead off around or corner or trail into to darkness. This gives the sense of mystery to my work, but I also do this to engender a combination of fear and intrigue of the unkown into scenes that would normally be quite mundane. However I feel that this may be somewhat lost on my audience, and that is down to the photographs simply not being clear enough in their intention, and I need to find away to make this point visually without using any blatant horror tropes such as monsters. Work such as the two images above, while visually successful in being atmospheric images, don't seem to hold the mystery I would hope to convey.
While Silent Hill inspired me to reproduce the sense of the mystery and fear of the unkown in my work, Gregory Crewdson, and specifically his book "Twilight" (2002), influenced my decision to work at night and to begin adding the presence of a person or some kind of character into my works. Crewdon uses actors in "elaborately staged, mostly nocturnal scenes" where "ordinary people act in strange ways as a result, possibly, of some kind of supernatural visitation: an entranced man is covering his living room floor with grassy sod; a woman in a short nightgown has built a great mound of flowers in the garage; a pregnant woman sleep-walks in her underwear out on the front lawn" (Johnson, 2000). In the Forward to "Twilight" Moody writes that a "Childhood of overhearing neighbours dreams" may be why Crewdson preferred Freuds Essays on the Uncanny(1919) to his other works, and this, in my opinion, can certainly be evidenced through the actions of his characters, and the resulting enigmatic narratives witch entranced me. The problem for me was that I can rarely get people to work with me on location at night in the cold, and unlike Crewdson I do not have the money to hire professional sound stages and actors (Chang, 2002).I have my self and my camera. But with a little influence from Silent Hill 2 and the film Jacobs ladder (1990) I decided to introduce myself into my images. Not wanting to be seen as myself (I am no actor after all) I have made use of my long exposures to position my self in the frame, but blur myself in the manner of Hooded man in the famous hospital gurney scene from Jacobs Ladder. However, preferring to work more subtly, and not interested in creating to much of sense of horror, I choose to position myself further back into the scenes, taking a smaller amount of the frame, rather like the characters in Crewdsons work. For me, this has been partly successful, as I have noted that one photo I have taken over the Christmas period has had particular interest from friends and family, as well as colleges at my local art gallery, where the inclusion of myself in the piece has led to them taking more time to explore the photograph, and question me on its purpose,
Moving forward with my work into informing contexts, I hope to improve the clarity of narratives in my work that embellish the uncanny, and the tension that I want to get across. Part of this, may be to take more control of my photos, with further planning into what will appear and what is important in both lighting, framing, and also through placement of subjects, and if not character, then perhaps props and colour. The aforementioned video game Dear Esther is a great example of environmental story telling, in "The Art of Dear Esther - Building an Environment to tell a Story" (GDC, 2018), Robert Briscoe describes how he found inspiration from the impressionists whose paintings he found to be "so atmospheric" and mysterious, he identifies key qualities of this style as a strong sense of light and atmosphere with a constrained color pallet, witch is something I already aim for in my practice. Perhaps some research of my own in the impressionists would be a good move for to take in this next module.
Bibliography
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