Mess

Mess

Typically when one thinks of the word “mess” one thinks of a messy house, a typical teenager’s room or papers all over the place. To be honest those were the first things that came through my mind. The dictionary defines mess as “a dirty, untidy, or disordered condition”. But that was too literal, and also I wanted to create a picture that truly wowed the viewer and I felt that by doing a messy room that would be a little hard to do. I went through ideas and different types of messes, and even though what I stumbled upon and decided to do is a bit clique I felt it could give me the strength I needed for my picture. Thus I chose to do emotional mess. The dictionary had 13 definitions for just the word “mess” and the last definition was “a person whose life or affairs are in a state of confusion, esp. a person with a confused or disorganized moral or psychological outlook.”

When I first thought of emotional mess, words like “crying”, “ sad” came to mind. The initial image in my head was to have a straight head and shoulder shot (preferably with bare shoulders and female), messy hair, smudged eyeliner and with a lot of emotion in the models eye. That was the main thing I was trying to concentrate, to try to really show the viewer the confusion and sadness in the model. I chose to do the picture in black and white because I personally feel that in black and white emotions are transmitted a lot better and it really captures someone eye. I think that I like it so much because in real life everything is in colour and black and white allows for more imagination. But that’s slightly outside of the point.

I used a good friend of mine as the model and at first it was a bit hard to get her to really look sad, not with the make up and the hair because those were easily fixed but to get her to have a sad emotion in her eyes. I took over 25 pictures and I just snapped away to try and catch that one picture that really shows what I wanted. After a while I decided to let her position herself in what she felt was most efficient for the shot. And after a while it was more natural for her and she started thinking of the dog that she left in Costa Rica and then that’s when true sad eyes started to appear. I actually got rather inspired and it was flash after flash, and I was rather excited.

I usually like to do weird crops in my pictures, crops such as half a face or cutting it off at the top of the forehead and I wasn’t sure if Ms. Dele would like that since she previously said that I make random crops. But I think it fits this picture because then it makes the viewer concentrate more on the eyes and the expression that anything else and that is what I’m trying to achieve. Also I like how she’s looking away, as if she’s too much of a mess or too sad to even look someone straight in the eye.

It was fun to shoot and I think it turned out rather nicely considering that all I had to use was a desk light and my normal digital camera. I wanted there to be more difference between the side of the face that had the light on it and make it a lot darker on the other side but my flash would always go off and if I had it off it would go blurry. But I think that it still manages to look good and there is still quite a difference between both sides of the face.

I did a little tweaking with Photoshop and I just made there be more lines and played around with the contrast and exposure.

I found a photographer called Raphael Guarino. He takes some amazing portraits in black and white. He takes from a very elderly woman with the most interesting faces to angsty teenagers. All his pictures have very interesting lighting and they all show a lot of emotions, but the emotions seem to mostly be sadness or anger. Sadly I could not find a lot about him personally but his pictures really struck me because that is the type of pictures that I love and that I find most interesting.

It was pretty hard to actually try to string in what I thought of emotional mess into one picture and actually having to get the model to get pretty personal and get physically upset. But thank god that she’s a good friend of mine and that she was able to help me. I was a little bit scared to how well my picture would come out because I don’t have the best camera ever and I wasn’t sure if what I had in my mind was going to be able to translate into a picture. That always happens to me, I have this image in my head and then I cant really express it in photography or drawing or anything like that so that was one thing that I was excited to see how it came out. I am happy about how it came out and I think that it effectively expresses what I wanted to do. Maybe the word that comes to mind is not mess but I definitely think that “sad” or “broken” comes to mind, which I think fit very nicely to “emotional mess”. I was pretty happy with my word because it wasn’t too hard to think of something and I know that some other of my classmates did have a hard time to come up with a picture to take but overall I think I really captured what “mess” means to me.

Raphael Guarino website here.