Improvised Studio

I spent yesterday shooting some self portraits and photographing items for my project. Since I don’t have access to a studio at the moment, and half of my equipment is still in Japan, I built myself a makeshift studio at home. Luckily I still had a couple of stands hanging around, as well as a single speed light and 3 broken photographic umbrellas. I didn’t have a backdrop, but I thought I’d go with the “it’s supposed to look like a bedsheet” aesthetic. To create this, I tied 2 dog leads between two stands and pegged a double bed sheet to them, and 4L cask wine as sandbags to weight them down. Despite my ingenious creativity,  it just ended up looking terrible. 

So I used the white wall of the living room instead.

I wasn’t really sure what I was going to shoot when I was setting up the space, but as I was doing so I remembered I had a bunch of kimono in my cupboard, and thought that wearing them might forge a good visual link to Japan, and my boyfriend’s nationality too. Building on that, I also had this vague idea that the images could be some kind of homage to the “present that we should be living right now.” (Perhaps subtly referencing what our situation would be like if we were together?)

I think the above image most clearly explains this notion, but in very subtle ways. When I made this image, I had in mind that it represents marriage. The white kimono representing both the white of a western wedding dress, as well as the white robes traditionally worn by a bride in a Japanese shinto wedding. The flowers represent the bouquet, but the fact that they are Australian natives and dead is supposed to symbolise the death of the possibility of marriage.

Maybe that’s too symbolic?

Anyway, I also took some different shots, including some of items (particularly the necklace pictured above, which is from Shinya and which has particularly deep significance that I won’t go into detail about here.)

I also photographed my own hair, which I know is revolting, but maybe it could be used for something?

After doing a quick selection, I also started playing around with different combinations of images, and thinking about the types of mini narratives that they might evoke. I like the way that they almost force meaning, and am interested to see what type of meaning others would draw from particular combinations of images.

I also took some other styles of self portraiture earlier in the week. I wanted to experiment with aesthetic, and also “the odd placement of bodies,” both of which I have seen used in the visual research conducted this week. The first image here was taken just after an upsetting FaceTime conversation with Shinya. The second, square image, is posed, but reflects how I feel about the whole isolation situation at the moment.