Tag: iPhone photography

experimenting with images and text, book making, layers of meaning

I’m continuing to experiment with putting/printing my photos onto paper and adding handwritten text. I’m going to scan the pages, print them, add more layers of images and text, scan them again, print them again, see what that does. I’m going to try printing directly onto grid or lined paper from from notebooks like the one below, instead of just onto regular white copy paper. I want to create a book to present images of most of the self-portraits from this project, along with the text taken from the OnlyFans captions.

I like taking the captions and writing them by hand, breaking them up and singling out certain words or building upon them with new words. I’ve also been physically cutting up some of the paper that I’ve written text on to, which distorts things a little and offers additional layers of meaning. I like the physical element of this way of making. As in, I could create layers of text/images digitally but I like doing it by hand, the writing and cutting up and scanning and printing.

new self-portraits

I made some new self-portraits last night and this morning, experimenting with the bridal/wedding aesthetic. Here are some examples:

Things that worked well:

  • I finally bought a handheld bluetooth remote thing to use with my phone to take photos, I don’t know why I put this off for so long. I think because I like to use the bare minimum when it comes to equipment/tech so I was just being stubborn about it, idk. But using this made things a lot easier and quicker.
  • Using a wedding veil as a prop gave good results aesthetically.
  • It was refreshing doing something different to usual, new theme, new clothes, new props.
  • Usually I listen to music when I’m taking photos. This time I didn’t and I preferred it. I think I was able to focus more and things seemed to flow better and it felt more productive.

Challenges:

  • The wedding veil was hard to work with, though I like the way it looks. It’s long, it kept sliding around and I was often half tripping over it. Also being covered in it made me hot really quickly from the synthetic which I didn’t expect because it’s so light but it felt very bad on my skin.
  • Realised a simple thing which is that I need to make sure I drink more water while I’m working, the tiring-ness of making photos/videos tends to kind of creep up on me and then I’ll suddenly feel faint and dehydrated.
  • Making self-portraits is a lot harder when I have my period, there’s just more to think about, plus the intense pain and fatigue and increased anxiety. I don’t feel as much like moving my body around and doing things that rely on physical action, so I usually try to plan my longer shoots around this. I wasn’t able to do that on this occasion and it felt particularly precarious doing a shoot that involved all white clothes and underwear. Really need to try and avoid this next time. It’s frustrating to have to think about this.

trying to reflect on my self-portraits

I’ve been trying to think with more depth or precision about what I like and don’t like about my photos, what makes them work or not work. But I get kind of annoyed and frustrated when I feel pressured to do this. The pressure is from myself but also in the context of the course because it’s important to reflect on our work. I’m not frustrated by being encouraged to reflect, I’m frustrated because I feel like I can’t articulate clearly enough why I think certain photos work and others don’t. Maybe I should try to write about them more frequently.

This one works:

Why does it work? It just feels right to me. Why? Things feel like they’re in the right place. The long exposure effect has placed a ghostly image of the phone receiver over my body in a way that looks right. The lamp in the background works and makes the photo better than if it wasn’t there, I think.

This one works to me because of the way my body is angled. It creates a small but, to me, significant tension. And I like the laptop being there, the image would be less interesting to me without it. I think the laptop kind of “ruins” the image which I like. Because the body element of the photo has a sensual quality and then there’s this blunt, inanimate, technological object next to the live body. I guess that’s been something I’ve been working with the whole time, the intersection of the live/sensual/sexual/corporeal/moveable with the inanimate – laptops, phones, hard surfaces.