K(no)w Fear

The whole concept behind my exhibition was to personalize my fears and give them life through photography, recreating them in strange and dreamlike situations. The environments I constructed were possible through various props, angles, and some photo manipulation using Photoshop. Some examples of the props used were: coffins, polaroids, cardboard boxes, and fish hooks. Each photograph is supposed to be suggestive of my fears, and weren’t always going to be a literal representation of them due to many of them being intangible. I felt it was necessary for each photograph to hold a different model so it could give the viewer the sense of anonymousness, and allow them to connect to my fears more personally. The other goal of this project was to exemplify that just because you know someone doesn’t mean you know their fears. Every person holds individual circumstances, and I feel that fear is a major component of what makes us human. My final attempt to help people connect with my fears was to write their own on my wall, publicly, forcing them to share something about themselves, just like I did.

As with everyone else, I’ve always had fear in my life. More specifically, I suffer from a unique phobia called Galeophobia, the fear of sharks. It’s always been a fun fact about myself, but it wasn’t until I took a class in ceramics that I truly started exploring the idea of fears. Why do we have them? Why do certain people fear things that other people scoff at? I went through many concepts of fears, such as my friend’s fears, the stages of fear, and even created my own mythology and origin of fear. But I never stopped to think about my fears. It really is difficult to sit down and think about what terrifies you, since it’s not constantly happening at the moment. The actual collection you see before you took me a few weeks before I realized I was scared of them, and that is what makes me think they’re authentic, not last minute great ideas. I think it’s really therapeutic and personal to put my fears out there, since they are technically weaknesses, and there they are hanging on the wall, exposed.

In order to make this project work, I needed three essential things: my camera, my tripod, and Photoshop. The most obvious after that were the models, props, and locations used in my photographs. Each model was relatively easy to find because they were all my friends, but many of them are located in towns hours away or the locations themselves were far. Since the majority of my locations were outside, it was tricky to work with the weather; either it was raining, or the time of the day caused the sun to become too harsh, which becomes problematic because of time schedules. Then came the process of using/creating props for my photographs. The 9 coffins you see in the “Fear of Death” took me and my father almost 2 weeks to complete. Other items such as the snakes and anchor were more of a matter of when I could use them, and the rest were just an issue of buying them. The actual scenes you see before you were a photograph of hundreds, each shoot averaging out to a total of 300-400 photos taken, which allows me to see different perspectives and experiment with angles that I may have never tried before. There are so many variables when it comes to photography: lighting, composition, focus; any number of these things can and will change within a split second. For some photo shoots, I required an assistant because of the amount of work it took to set up, or to lug all the props and equipment around.

The series is ongoing and I am constantly adding to it (fear of not existing onward).