Assignment 2: Visa Versa
The assignment was quite open, it wanted us to take what had worked in this part and expand on it to make a themed body of work.
I have been the photographer in residence at the chapel studio for most of the summer and have had almost unrestricted access to the space, I have a large lighting set up and have been indulging in a lot of studio practice so I felt that this assignment needed to be in the studio.
I was thinking about Douglas Huebler’s experiment with Bernd Beecher called variable piece 101, which made me contemplate the idea that you could express emotion using facial expression and body language.
I was looking at the model of emotion by Robert Plutchik which defined the following emotions:
- Joy
- Fear
- Anger
- Sadness
- Disgust
- Trust
- Anticipation
- Surprise
I was fortunate to be doing a shoot with the lovely Megan who is working on her muscles for a pure elite competition and wanted some images for her portfolio, so at the end I hijacked her and got her to act each of those emotions.
Spurred on by the success of this I decided I wanted to find 8 different models (different model same background) to act each emotion and thus also incorporate another aspect of the module so far.
I found my subjects and got each one to pul;l all eight emotions, I then took the whole body of images and edited them down so I had the best of each emotion, I then had to decide where there the same person was best which to keep and what to replace the rejected image with. I finally ended up with all 8 emotions each one played by a different model. The final edit was tough and some great images were rejected but the final selection worked as a body.
You can see the assignment here: Assignment 2 Visa Versa