Significant Him is an ongoing project about distance in relationships. It focuses on Lee and myself and aims to show our strengths and weaknesses, whilst living on opposite sides of the country. This project resonates with people, those who have experienced long distance relations, those who may in the future and those that never have nor ever will but may have their own challenges in their relationships.
On average forty percent of long distance couples end their relationships with many ending in less than five months. Lee and myself have been together for well over a year and have spent a lot of that time on opposite sides of the country. I would say the time spent together is more passionate and valued, as we know we need to make the most of our time
together. I believe that a relationship is strongest when understanding one another's struggles and being a support system for one another, something we both do extremely diligently.
I wanted to begin with some of the visual artists I have looked at for inspiration throughout this project. The Likes of; Sally Mann, Laura Pannack and Sian Davey to name a few. I created a visual mood board combined with their images.
For my first shoot, I somehow convinced my boyfriend to get out of bed at about 6am and subsequently strip down to the bare minimum on a public beach in temperatures of about 2 degrees. My idea for this shoot was to try and visualise movement and also barriers.
I then began looking at ourselves as individuals. In two seperate shoots I photographed Lee close up and did the same for myself. I wanted to compare the two shoots, although the pictures are very similar they also have slight differences like the slight different tones. I wanted to see how it felt to be the subject matter in such an intimate type of shoot, so that I could understand what this felt like for him.
I then thought about including myself in the project, and at this point I knew what specific direction I wanted to go down. This was to focus on our relationship, specifically how we cope with the long distance whilst I am here at university. Trying to show these feelings of absence was quite challenging. So I started experimenting using touch and quickly realised that it was the feeling of being held that we both missed the most when apart.
I therefore began looking at our hands and the touching of the hands, as seen in these images we are reaching out for one another, my favorite image is this,
This image where it looked like we are making the infinity sign. I think this image alone is quite strong and sends a powerful message, a symbol of love and commitment.
I then started photographing Lee with just my hands in the frame. Although it may not look it, this was pretty challenging to shoot as for the majority of the images I didn’t have use of either of my hands. I then began sorting through my images.
I ended up choosing these two images as I felt they resonated the most with the theme. I like how they feel quite delicate and I also really love the focus on the eyes on the left image. I went on to think about how I would display these images for our exhibition here.
Here’s Lee posing next to his images. I wanted to experiment with them on a large scale like I suggested in my last presentation, so I decided to print two A1 images. They are secured down with double sided tape as I thought that this would be more subtle on the wall rather than using either a frame or have them nailed into the wall. I also included my artist statement which gives a short explanation of my project including a title of which I only recently came to a decision on, called Significant Him.
Moving onto how I am planning on moving on with the project and how I currently think I will display for the free range show. At this moment in time I am thinking I will reshoot with a clearer set of images in my head, I know now what works well and what doesn’t. I also want to experiment more with film, I have included some of Lee I took in summer. When it comes to displaying my work I think I will go smaller as I think it will be more intimate to get the message across.
I am imagining something similar to the exhibition I saw at the Guggenheim gallery in New York, which I was lucky enough to go and see at the beginning of the year. I actually believe the exhibit has now finished so I was very fortunate. The exhibit features photos by Robert Mapplethorpe, installed as a response to his book, The Black Book. It includes text from diverse sources from philosophers to curators some written specifically in response to Mapplethorpe himself.
Alongside my framed images I wanted to incorporate, text, from books, poems to lyrics. With the key theme of love and absence. I am also planning to add some notes Lee and myself have written to each other since the beginning of our relationship. These are the examples of what I am thinking about including.
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