The Inspiration For The Idea

There were two main inspirations for this idea. One was the desire to work with portraits again and builds on a project I did in first year that looked at secrets. I got people to give me secrets and also found some on the internet. I then put these secrets onto postcards and gave them to random people to hold in portraits for me. None of the actual secrets, to my knowledge, represented or were true to the person holding them, but it was interesting to see how the person looked while holding them and how other people's reactions to them were.

Below are several images of mine from this project. While I like them, it was a shorter project and I've wanted to go back and explore portraiture and the aspects of identity again ever since.


While this project started out as fun, I got more interested in how intense and serious it could be and wanted to look at that side more which is one of the reasons I'm so interested in this project. Self-perception, self-confidence and the way people see themselves is a serious issue. You only have to look at the recent suicides in America by homosexual teenagers. It's tragic that because of the way they're treat and they think people see them that they've been pushed to this. I don't intend to go quite that deep with the project, but it shows you that self-image is a current topic and this is something that spurs my idea on more.

I also have a personal interest in this project. I've struggled with self-confidence and body image from a young age and most of it has been self-inflicted. I'm more confident now than ever before, but I'm still quite shy and nervous around new people or in new situations. It's hard to explain why, I never experienced much bullying in school, I was generally left alone, but the lack of confidence seemed to come from me. I'm pretty sure my own description of myself wouldn't match how others would describe me, or possibly it would. It might depend on how well people know me. I did a lot of thinking during the summer as a project more personal to me is one I tend to produce the better work for and the issues I have are ones that most people have in one way or another. Exploring identity and msyelf were the other big inspiration for this project.