major project introduction
My project has taken direct inspiration from the early stages of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s. It is all about taking away the idea of perfection that is so drummed into everyday society out of the art and letting something more raw and organic happen by complete chance. After studying the surrealist movement and the chance games they used to experiment with, and the Freudian theory that inspired the whole movement, I was fascinated by the idea of the unconscious as well as things happening completely at random. Andre Breton was a poet who arguably founded the entire movement, which was kick-started by his experiments with automatic writing. I became deeply interested in this 'automatism' and experimented myself with techniques invented by Max Ernst in a sketch book – focusing particularly on chance games like tearing up paper and dropping it onto the page from a height, and sticking it where ever it landed. I also experimented with frottage and fumage and other collage experiments inspired by Ernst. Automatism is a way of tapping into the unconscious and I was intrigued by that. As a way of tapping into my unconscious I started documenting my dreams and practising with automatic writing myself, which I intertwined with collages in my sketch book. What goes into ones unconscious is completely left down to chance; depending on the life experiences they've been through, what they've seen and places they've been. I wanted to mirror this in my project; summarize the things that get filtered into the unconscious completely by random chance. The smallest of things made up by a matter of nano seconds can have such an impact on a person and determines what goes into the unconscious, and that is essentially what determines someone's personality, and I wanted my final piece to be like a visual representation of all the fragments the unconscious mind has to take in, and demonstrate the randomness of it all. I did this by taking all of the conscious decision making out of the photography. I shot entirely on disposables so I would have no technical control over the end result of the image, mistakes and light leaks would be a chance occurrence that I wouldn't deliberately try to avoid. I used a dice, a deck of cards to determine when I would press the shutter and at what angle the camera would point when I pressed it. I also did some shoots blindfolded, with someone else telling me when to randomly stop, spin around and point in a direction. I scanned and reprinted each individual photo and made photo albums, as a way of giving the viewer a closer look at the images and as a way to make the understand the process of shooting them; which I feel is the fundamental aspect of this project. The reprints are a lower quality than the original pictures and some have slight marks and scratches on them – this is another thing I didn't deliberately try to avoid because again I wanted to remain completely true to the project and keep it as organic and as true to the process as possible.
