I have begun this academic year with a lot of questions and thoughts about my life. I realise how far I have come through these last 2 years at University and notice that I am starting to understand who I really am as a person. I would like to use this year as a form of ‘Photo Therapy’ and as a way of getting to know myself and learning how to express myself through Photography. I would like to learn how to explain the way I feel and how certain events in my past have affected my life now.
I have always struggled to understand and believe certain things that go on around me, I find it difficult creating relationships with people as I have a very unstable way of thinking and therefore cannot fully trust anyone. I often believe that there is no way I have had a boyfriend for this long and that he must be some sort of ‘Russian Spy’, which to a lot of people sounds silly, but to me, I consider this being a possibility a little too often.
I would like to use this year to find a form of communication of not necessarily big things that affect me in life but also small things. I am thinking I would like to start the year by using the idea of ‘Being Watched/ Surveillance’. I remember watching the Truman Show a number of years ago when I was still quite young, and I have always felt a sort of odd connection to it, in the way that I always feel people are watching me or that everything around me has been planned, I realise that I have mentioned the film almost every time I have had to explain this feeling to a new counsellor or similar. I watched it again recently to get some ideas, and I really do like the idea of creating a project based on this thought, based on not only being watched but also conspiracy theories in the idea that everything does happen for a reason and that the world is not really what we think it is. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a conspiracy theorist, however I do, and have for a long time, tried to think about stories that others would find silly, to almost make sense of my life and I feel as if I do it to create hope for myself that maybe there is something that has been planned for me and that going through all the crap my siblings and I went through as kids is just a way of preparing us for that thing.
I have found a lot of inspiration from a number of films and some books ( The Island, 1984, The Hunger Games, etc) and so I feel I would like to make this in a sort of fictional setting and possibly have a cinematic outcome, as whenever I tell anyone about my past, they do end up telling me that it sounds like something they would read in a book…
Aesthetically, I am thinking along the lines of distorted views and looking through CCTV cameras as well as looking into the possibility that we can be watched through everything day things such as our phones, computers, webcams, microphones, but also maybe, as crazy as it sounds, plants and wildlife which has been in a lot of conspiracy theories before.
I am not too sure yet how I would like to form the imagery of this project, but I am forming new ideas and visuals everyday so I do believe that there is a lot to think about and do with it, my only worry is that it can become a bit too much of a big project, so I will try my best to keep it as narrow as possible.
I created a mood board to give myself a visual of what I would like to get, aesthetically, out of this project.