#he really did try to model himself on mora and it shows in such interesting ways

[vaguely-concerned]

watching odo just have to sit there in the background as dr mora is talking about him as a 'child' is giving me. such a visceral reaction. I too want to surrender my physical integrity and become formless goo to get away from being inside my own skin while listening to this. this one scene in a 1990s sci-fi show has better expressed my experience of neuroatypicality than every explicit piece of representation I've ever seen (save harrow the ninth but then no one is doing it like harrow the ninth it can't be beaten).

MORA: It would seem to me that being a scientist yourself, Lieutenant, you can appreciate the difficulty of our dilemma, and the elegance of the solution. When Odo was first found, nobody knew who, or indeed, what it was we were dealing with. A shapeless, viscous mass of fluid, a veritable organic broth. That was our Odo in the beginning. DAX: When did you realise you were dealing with a sentient lifeform? ODO: He didn't. I had to teach him that myself.

sometimes you are truly just sitting there while someone cheerfully calls your vulnerable unguarded childhood self a shapeless viscous mass of fluid or likens your body and soul to a vaguely unpleasant soup and you can't say shit about it. and the fact that young odo started to shapeshift as a desperate wordless helpless plea of 'please stop hurting me', and the way he phrases it as 'teach him that myself' in an attempt to cling on to some sort of control and agency he has to believe he had in that situation........

[rebeccapictures-blog]

Surrealism shown through portraiture:

A personal exploration of Surrealism in photography,

by Rebecca Jones

 Surrealism: noun: a twentieth century avant garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, eg, by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

  Andre Breton wrote the ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ in 1924 in Paris and it quickly became a radical international movement, bringing together writers, artists, photographers and filmmakers.

 Surrealist artists, writers and photographers were interested in exploring the mind, the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary. They championed dreams and the unconscious and used unexpected and unconventional images to express this. The idea was to free people from ‘false’ rationality’ and the constraints of traditional social structures. The surrealists saw reason as a block to the freedom of the creative mind.

 Today, surreal can be loosely taken to mean ���strange” or “dreamlike”, as well as its original meaning as the exploration of the uncontrolled exploration of the psyche through art.

 The visual artists who first worked with Surrealist techniques and imagery were Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Man Ray. Masson’s free-association drawings from 1924 are curving, continuous lines out of which emerge strange and symbolic figures that are products of an uninhibited mind.

 The key elements used were dream analysis and the juxtaposition of elements in the same frame not normally seen together.

 Photography soon came to occupy a central role in Surrealist activity. In the works of Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, the use of double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality. Man Ray’ ‘Rayographs’ were made by placing objects directly on to photographic paper in the darkroom, directly manipulating the final medium, without the use of a camera. Tabard images show a room with a huge eye in one wall, or a woman merging with a tree.

 Other photographers also used rotation or distortion to render their images uncanny. Hans Bellmer, an engineer, obsessively photographed mechanical dolls he made himself, creating strangely sexualized images, while the painter René Magritte used the camera to create photographic equivalents of his paintings.

 In her close-up photograph of a baby armadillo, ‘Portrait of Ubu’, Dora Maar uses no manipulation, but creates a strange and eerie sense of the grotesque. Many surrealist photographs use banal or popular images in an unexpected or jarring way.

 Grounded in reality, but challenging perception, these images trick the eye by presenting a distorted reality both familiar and unsettling.

 In some ways, my project started at the ‘Radical Eye’ exhibition in London, where I first saw the original ‘Glass Tears’ photograph by Man Ray. But it was also influenced by my final project at the end of my AS year, which explored the idea of how fashion can create the individual identity.

 At the beginning of this project I undertook a variety of research paths, so that I could plan out how I was going to explore my chosen theme within photography. Firstly, I drew up a mood board, which consisted of ideas for the shoots that I was going to undertake for this project. This included different proposals to the environments that I was going to shoot in and the styles that each shoot was going to adopt. For example, surrealism within nature was planned out to consist of double exposures created through Photoshop. 

 After this, I researched six photographers who were relevant to my project: Antonia Mora, Timothy Pakron, Daniel Calvert, Sarah Ann Loreth, Laura Williams and Oleg Oprisco. This gave me a wider mind set as to the different styles of photographs that I could produce within my project concept. I then drew up a further mood board, presenting alternative project ideas. However, after doing this I still wanted to stick with my initial idea of surrealist portraiture. 

 I decided to explore Surrealist portraiture for my personal investigation because it is a style of photography that I have not experimented with before. I am extremely interested in and inspired by it. Moreover, I thought that this would especially be a good opportunity to experiment with and practice my Photoshop skills. I hoped that this would overall help with future shoots and the editing that will be involved in them. 

Each of my shoots has been produced in a complex way, which reflects my proposal of conveying surrealism through the concept of portraiture. Each one has involved layer upon layer of image taking, editing, and manipulation.

 Overall, my project idea has resulted in a number of different shoots, in a variety of different styles of photography. These different techniques and styles of photography include: 35mm film portraiture, double exposures, edited studio portraiture (using coloured gel lighting, white background, black background). All of which were influenced by and draw from the practice of the different artists researched at the start of this project. 

 Film portraiture was the style of photography in which I experimented with the most. I ended up producing a wide variety of 35mm film photos using a range of different equipment. For example, I used paintbrushes to brush and “splattered” the developer on to the light exposed images in the darkroom. The photographer Timothy Pakron especially inspired me for this section of my work. He is a visual artist from the coast of Mississippi and his practice draws upon painting, which he studied at art school in South Carolina. I found the way in which he develops his portraits to make them look almost like paintings very creative and interesting. This is something that I especially wanted to evoke throughout my project. 

 Pakron uses the act of painting and the medium of photography in an attempt to capture the essence or true identity of his subject at the moment of the photograph. So, he is rejecting the ‘traditional’ use of photography as capturing reality in an unbiased or ‘objective’ way.

 I researched how Pakron made his pictures and set to attempt something similar.

 Another technique of photography I used a lot within this project, was double exposure, mainly inspired by photographer Antonio Mora. The way in which his superimposed portraits blend human and natural worlds into surreal hybrid artworks really interested me. Mora works with images ha has found while browsing through online databases and magazines, and then fuses them together using Photoshop. His seamless mixing of various concepts presents the viewer with mind- tricking illusions. This is something that I was eager to portray in my own surrealism project. 

Sarah Ann Loreth, Laura Williams and Oleg Oprisco are all photographers that I researched for this project, but didn’t draw as much the inspiration from. Loreth is a fine art photographer from New Hampshire, who specializes in self- portraiture. In her work she tries to convey a quiet stillness of emotion with connection to her natural surroundings. From her use of colour and scurrility she creates a reality found only in her imagination but with an emotion that is undeniably human.

 Williams uses photography to blur the lines between real life and fantasy to create unusual artworks. Her work is inspired by everything around her daily life and by objects that tell stories.  

 Most of these images were chosen for my final piece, a photo book consisting of the 20 best photographs from my surrealism project. I mainly used the images from the surrealist-inspired 35mm film shoot and the landscape/model portraits that came from my summer composition shoot. 

 The images Ffion #3 and Ffion #6 consist of a superimposed portrait of a model and a group of identical and tall woodland trees. This was the first image that I produced for this project. I found that the two images complemented each other

 I decided to place these two photos together as, looking at them both individually, I realised that both the gap in the trees and the model’s head were taken at similar angels and were similar shapes. So therefore would place well together and suit the theme of surrealist portraiture. 

 I managed to edit my model’s face into the gap in the trees where the sky is. After editing this photo I enhanced the brightness and contrast and changed the colour balance to black and white. This overall emphasised the model’s face peering through the trees, ultimately making it the main focus of the image. After printing this image in colour at first, I soon realised that it would suit my project concept of surrealist portraiture a lot more if it were in black and white. 

 I would say that this portrait is definitely one of my most successful double exposed images.

A lot of work especially went into this image and therefore as a result turned out extremely well. Due to this I placed this image on the front cover of my photo book and the main centre image. 

 When producing the image ‘Callum’ in the darkroom, I applied the developer with a paintbrush, almost trying to make it look like a painting instead of a photo (like Timothy Patron does in a lot of his work) and also trying to convey the theme of surrealism within the portrait. After having undertaken this work in the dark room, I then placed the developed film portrait into a scanner and then down loaded the image to Photoshop to edit out anything that I did not want in it. 

 In conclusion, I am extremely happy with the way the project developed. I feel as though the concept was developed as planned and really explored and conveyed the theme of surrealist portraiture. Overall, I would say that the strongest aspect of my work would definitely be my 35mm film work, as I was able to produce a large variety of work within this area of photography using many different tools and developing methods in the darkroom. My researched photographers definitely helped and supported my photographic ideas, as most of my inspiration for the different styles of surrealist portraiture shoots came from them. 

 Technically, I learned a lot about using Photoshop to edit my images. Specifically, I learned how to superimpose two photos together, change the colour balance of an image and also edit out anything extraneous, which I wasn't happy with in the image. 

 More importantly, my research and practice during this project has taught me to ‘think outside the box’. It has made me question what can be regarded as a cliche in photography and helped me to develop my own thinking in developing my ideas. It has broadened my mindset in terms of how I can produce images and indeed, what I want those images to say.