The Demon's Name Is Surveillance
Smartcam: 2016: Part Thirteen
(August, 2016)
I suppose this collection garners a bit of explanation before you start scratching your heads wondering what is significance of these photographs. In middle school, I took an elective class called "Believe It Or Not," which looked at some of life's peculiar mysteries like Bigfoot, UFOs, and ghosts. I realized my mistake too late when I saw that "demonic possession" was also on the curriculum, and, as a Christian, this was a very real concept that terrified me. So I trooped through the quarter, hoping that it would be a discarded topic. To my dismay, we not only studied demonic possession, but we watched documentaries with supposedly possessed victims. In one particular class, I began drawing intensely on note cards to distract myself. For no reason other than my pack rat nature, I stored them away in a memory box.
Only a month ago, I rediscovered those cards and looked at them with a fascinating new perspective. These were pictures drawn when I was in a state of total panic, and the result was almost a physical manifestation of my fears and anxieties at the time. Who else gets the chance to see what fear literally looks like? I immediately photographed the cards and tweaked the look so you could see the graphite smudges and dirt that had collected over time. I hope you find something interesting out of this collection like I did.
(August, 2016)
I suppose this collection garners a bit of explanation before you start scratching your heads wondering what is significance of these photographs. In middle school, I took an elective class called "Believe It Or Not," which looked at some of life's peculiar mysteries like Bigfoot, UFOs, and ghosts. I realized my mistake too late when I saw that "demonic possession" was also on the curriculum, and, as a Christian, this was a very real concept that terrified me. So I trooped through the quarter, hoping that it would be a discarded topic. To my dismay, we not only studied demonic possession, but we watched documentaries with supposedly possessed victims. In one particular class, I began drawing intensely on note cards to distract myself. For no reason other than my pack rat nature, I stored them away in a memory box.
Only a month ago, I rediscovered those cards and looked at them with a fascinating new perspective. These were pictures drawn when I was in a state of total panic, and the result was almost a physical manifestation of my fears and anxieties at the time. Who else gets the chance to see what fear literally looks like? I immediately photographed the cards and tweaked the look so you could see the graphite smudges and dirt that had collected over time. I hope you find something interesting out of this collection like I did.
Comments
Post a Comment