Just because you feel it doesn't mean it's there
For the landscape assignment I have been studying my current local environment by walking around and noticing how it is constructed by humans for humans; hierarchy of men is on top of everything, even before the wild nature. Every corner is made for men, even for their waste and corpses of dead men. This notion made me think about graveyards, how we're making space for something that isn't even there for sentimental and religious reasons. How strange it is how human corpses are creating this landscape within living people all around the world and how similar the view of every graveyard is.
After my walks in Chatham and Rochester graveyards I did some research about graveyards as a part of landscape by reading Richard Francaviglia's essay 'Necrogeography'. In the essay he talks about architectural analysis of style and stylistic change of markers, gravestones, and tombstones, and geographical analysis of the cemetery as an element in local land use patterns. I wasn't too interested about the architectural side of graveyards, I was more interested in the local land use patterns and the idea of these graveyards being storage units of dead humans.
What I want to photograph is graveyard landscapes with feelings of the people who has lost these people. I want to show that something that was there a long time ago; a spirit, an emotion, a pattern of a relationship probably isn't there anymore, but the feeling of it all stays within the people.
Spirit Photography by Willian Hope
For a visual guide for my photographs I have been researching William Hope's Spirit Photography. His way of photographing the spirit with the living, the double exposure, is what I want to do with my photography as well. Instead of placing the dead and the living on the same level, or in my case placing the spirit and the landscape on the same level, I want to make the spirit more alive than the landscape by either giving that exposure more colour or using flash.
Other inspiration for my idea came from Francesca Woodman's photography, where she places herself naked in different positions in different places. I want my spirits to have the same sort of feeling of misplacement and dissappearance in the face of the background, the environment and landscape.
Photographs by Francesca Woodman
To be continued...
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