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Project 03 - Concrete Styx
This project was inspired by an event which may be familiar to many, which is a long boring road trip where you have to pass through the middle of nowhere to get to your destination. Initially as I started to develop the concept for this project I wanted to present an endless repeating journey, but I started piecing the images together I found out that it would have more meaning if I gave that journey a final destination, and perhaps that final destination is indeed the penultimate one; the inevitable end of life. I wanted to convey the feeling of entrapment by putting the user in a confined space and giving him a very rigid sense of movement. The car windshield acts as a frame or a border of what is about to come and were the viewers are pulled forward as the piece progresses. Aside from the central image, there are two images on the sites which lack the suffocating confined sense of vision that the central image has yet the way they their perspective is forced gives rise to the need to shift the view back in the center. Even though it’s very limited, the viewers are given a sense of perceptual control over the piece. However when the 6th picture appears, the perceptual control becomes obsolete since there is nothing to view but darkness and the two lights in the distance, and in the last slide the perceptual control is completely stripped away to highlight the fact that this is indeed the final stop. I wanted to emphasize the contrast between the side images and the central image. As I said above, the side images are free from obtrusive borders, and have a much more idyllic colour palette with a seemingly gold hue which the central image however lacks. The side images are meant to represent different more hopeful paths then the one that is set upon yet due to the one way nature of the journey, a detour can which can only be a lucid dream. One thing that always fascinated me in photography is how clouds appear and how they affect the image as a whole. They can portray hope by having the sun project rays through them or portray despair by obstructing it. The central images in my piece have an ever increasing presence of clouds which provides a foreboding sense of dread as it goes along, up until the last image where the sky clears, and indication that the turbulent journey has indeed ended. |
