26 months of taking pictures

14 months of developing a passion.

I want to share my photographic journey with you in pictures. I'm inspired by how a photographer can grow in so many different ways. I've grown mentally, emotionally, and in my ability to create photographs. Photography changed my life, and is still changing it, so let's see where I started and where I am now.  :)

November 2009

My first ever conceptual photograph. I took it for a competition. It's portraying Anorexia. At this point I didn't use photoshop and didn't reflect on my personal life. I guess I was just unaware of how to use feelings and deep visions to create art. This was also before I discovered my idol, Brooke Shaden.

November 2009
Created in photoscape. I was so inspired by dark art photography at this point.

May 2010

I downloaded gimp for the first time and learnt how to use layer masks. My first experimentation! Sloppy, but I was soooooo proud. I think I began to understand how powerful my dark art could potentially be.

May 2010
The first time I got really frustrated with the spaces I was using all the time. I wanted to go and experiment with things around me but didn't know how, and wasn't confident enough. 

November 2010

At this point I had discovered Brooke Shaden and finally learned how she achieved her beautifully inspiring images. Basically, textures. This was the first time I used a texture and a costume. I remember not knowing how to use textures properly so I applied this as an overlay. And the shadows are really sloppy looking. Nevertheless, I was proud of this, still am! Breaking point in my photography.

December 2010

I think this is the first time I embraced the darkness in my mind. I really wanted to portray an eerie location, feeling and I did. The editing makes me laugh really, because I am lying on a bed sheet and I just used the smudge tool to try and make it look like snow. I created the fog using a stock image...the hard way.

December 2010

I look back at this now and uhh...I think it's terrible. I was so confused editing this. Just looking back at this and knowing I could actually succeed in the editing portion makes me happy :) cause I obviously failed about a year ago.

January 2011

First picture I was really ever fully satisfied with.

April 2011.

Breaking point kind of picture. It was when I created this I found my artistic voice. I discovered how I liked portraying uncomfortable emotions and situations, in sometimes creepy and different ways. At this point I became really confident in what I was doing...not afraid to show the world who I really am. I walked through all the negative looks I got the next following weeks, proud of who I was becoming. 

July 2011.

Marks a really, really special moment in my life. I'll never forget this picture, this dress and what I felt at that time. 

November 2011

I am most proud of this picture. I am happy with every part of it, and it relates to my life so much. Just a very powerful picture for me, and made me realize nothing is impossible, and art is the most beautiful escape.

January 2012

I am so passionate about what I do. I'm learning every day. Photography is part of my every day life somehow...and it's always in my thoughts. I'm so inspired by the way you can create a moment in time. A moment in time that was only ever present in your imagination. I never want to stop...and hope you guys keep following me on this amazing journey xx

Suicide.

A graceful suicide.

This picture is about having a choice. A choice whether to be part of this world or not. A choice that would be peaceful, liberating, and painless. A soul resting.

I wanted to portray a soul peacefully escaping a body. The soul is being shed off like skin. Memories from the characters past flooding their mind.

*Please don't jump to conlusions here. If you'd like to contact me about this picture with any concerns/questions feel free. 

I recently went through my work and realized my most popular pieces had fairy-tale like qualities to them. Good/Bad?

I don't really know what to think about that. It's makes me wonder if I'm successfully portraying the deep and dark concepts I'm most passionate about. How dark and intense can a fairytale be?

Above you can see some of my most popular flickr pieces. They all have fairy-tale like qualities to them. Some more than others, but nevertheless I think you could imagine them coming from a storybook. All pictures, excluding the last one on the far right, have extremely deep concepts.

These concepts ranging from suicide, death, depression, losing a battle.

You can say I'm slightly concerned my photography may not be perceived as I'd like it to be perceived by my audience. Indeed, I do like the fairytale like look of some of my images, but I truly understand the concepts behind them. I do believe in deconstructing the typical fairytale and turning it into something dark, uncomfortable. However, do my audience realize that? Are my deep concepts masked by the intruiging delicate nature of fairytale images?

I've been kind of irked by the thought of my work being misunderstood to the point where there was a huge gap inbetween my knowledge of my work, and my audiences knowledge of my work. The thing that bothered me most is that I don't want to change my way of presenting my concepts, because I really enjoying 'confusing' and intruiging my viewers at the same time. It's like two parts of my mind were tugging at each other (like always). Is it worth it to stick to my artistic voice even though I have been noticing people misunderstanding my work? And this is not only on flickr. In 'real life' I only, I repeat...only, get positive feedback when my work is less dark visually. My concepts I must admit, are all equally as dark and deep, though sometimes I feel the need to portray them in a lighter way for whatever reasons. It's hard to describe why exactly I do that :) But every artist does it if you think about it. The fact that I get positive responses only when my work is lighter pretty much mean people are made less uncomfortable by the concepts I am portraying. I guess they don't believe they are as dark, or as I said, the soft tones and pretty locations mask the darkness of my concepts.

I guess I can understand why me, lying in a pretty blue fairy-tale like dress, surrounded by loads of green, can be mistaken as something lighter than suicide. 

I guess I'm working on convincing myself that conceptual art is something very...difficult, let's say. Everyone looks at your art differently and will have different opinions. It's not like a landscape artist capturing a picture of a lake and sharing it. There can't be much variety in opinions when it comes to receiving feedback on the picture. I guess the only way of succeeding is sticking to your own voice, and your own style. It is hard enough to succeed in anything believing in yourself to the fullest, but changing your ways of working because some people are getting confused will slowly ruin you as an artist.

I truly do believe I should stick to who I am, even though my work can be confusing to people not looking too deep into it. I'm going to start writing more about my pictures on my blog as 'picture spoilers' for anyone who is more interested. If they are not, it is their fault they don't understand my work, and not mine.

I do like when a viewer is able to create their own story behind an image, but confusing it as something completely different is not the goal of an artist (or atleast, not mine). 

"Take me with you"

I'm ready to go with the Earth.

Take me with you, as I don't belong

Grasp me

Absorb me

Free me

from this foreign land

I found this rotting, dead, and huge tree while exploring the forest today. It caught my eye instantly because of how alive it looked amongst all the neutral greys and browns of the winter. Ironic though, because it was rotten. 

It made me think about how things dead can live on in people's hearts, souls, and memories, and people alive and healthy can be so emotionally empty, they are essentially dead. I then thought about the connections between humans and earth, and again about death. Earth is where we all go eventually, and I wanted to place this young character against something pretty well ancient. 

The character is begging the earth for acceptance. For entry into an eternal land.