New developments before the Easter break

After the devastating feedback from last week's group tutorial and Daniel's assessment of "borderline fail" to my project so far, I wanted to forget about the whole business. I mean, what kind of motivation is "fail"? I understand that I am supposed to evolve with the project and change it and bring in new images every week. But I don't see why is the emphasize on this kind of change. Obviously I can take the project to different directions, but why do I have to do that just for the sake of it? I did a lot of research into the matter in the previous semester, including visual research and I have already changed my project this way and that way. Anyway, it doesn't matter how sick and tired I am of this project already, I do not want to fail it. So, this is what I have been doing in the past 6 days.

I wanted to explore a little bit further the idea that it is I who is tired of the city life, overcrowded public transport and the mundane daily life. So, I stole a few images of an office and a fake yeti from the interent and created this funny scene.I'm exploring what it is to become an animal in the modern metropolitan. As it is all about me, I am thinking of places and situations that most annoy me about London. There are many. Oxford Street (too many people!), the crowded public transport, the boring office job where people look the same...

I strated with the last one. To be honest, I am lucky to work in the office where people do not look the same. Similarly to the image I used above, people do not have to wear 'office clothes' and fortunately I only work once a week. But it is the idea, that is important here. So, I have photographed myself over and over again in the office. The figure in the foreground is inspired by Antony Crossfield's Foreign Body series. I tried the editing trick again at home - multiple bodies edited together into one. On Crossfield's images you can clearly see that there are images of two people combined together to create a new and mixed body, the lines between two bodies are merged but significant. On my images I wanted to create a new creature, the feeling should be that of misjudgement. While I was printing the images, a first year photography student looked at the one below and thought that it looks like I am having sex with myself. Interesting. Perhaps that is how it looks like at first sight. But look closer!

Following on from the previous theme, I am still trying to think of what it means to become animal and how to represent it on a photo. Here are two images that show me "posing as an animal" in a contemporary setting. After a long trial and error photo shoot accompanied by images of different animals for reference, I edited both of the images to emphasize the animal features.

The first one is "an animal at the water source". It could eb a leopard or gepard or somehtng like that.

The second is a gorilla brwsing the picnik area.

I haven't decides what to do with these images, yet. Tomorrow is the next tutorial...