Author: Yuto

As my work continues to develop, I have found a certain style to stick to. I decided that I want to keep my photos dark lit, as a way to set the tone for the kind of message that i’m trying to convey. This image is a more refined version of an image I photographed early on into this brief.

Within my photos, I decided to use an arm as a metaphor for something tempting/seducing you into using what that arm is holding (which is often a phone). If you look closely, you can spot a dark figure on the left side of this image. This is a metaphor for the “shoulder devil/angel” that is well known in mainstream media. In this image, the “devil” on the model’s right side is tempting her to spend more time on her phone at night, when she’s trying to avoid it. You can see how she’s avoiding eye contact with the phone shining closely at her face. Although I am not religious, biblical concepts like these are interesting to me.

Beksiński was a Polish photographer, sculptor and painter. I personally prefer his paintings amore as they give off this really eerie feeling, along with, a surrealist, horror theme to it. His paintings have this effect that reminds me of an image with a low shutter speed, and I definitely use that technique in most of my images. Something that I got by looking at his work is how much surrealist art has influenced my work, without me even realising it. The painting on the right definitely influenced my past few works, as I have used arms coming out of places, to convey a certain message.

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Bibliography

https://culture.pl/en/article/the-cursed-paintings-of-zdzislaw-beksinski

For today, I continued from the work I did yesterday and further on developed it. This time, I went with the idea of my device “tempting” me into using it. As someone who spends 7-9 hours of their day on their device, I get the urge to go on my device, just to go on my device. So to depict this emotion, I used my amateur photoshop skill to try to make it look like my laptop was reaching for me. What I found challenging was making the shadow. I had to think of the angles the shadows would look like and I had some trouble with that. After my photoshoot I did at night, I realised the importance of having a colour palette, as the image looks more put together.

I have two different versions for this. One with the arms coming out of my laptop, and one with just the shadows. I am currently leaning towards the one with just the shadows. This is because the arms are quite distracting, and I think it looks too “photoshopped” if that makes sense.

Today I wanted to work on photoshop a bit more. So I decided to develop more on the idea of overconsumption of media, which is something that becomes emotionally labouring and exhausting. I based this work on the photos I took before. I’ve been taking a on and off break from social media for a bit now. And when I used to constantly scroll through social media, I would unavoidably come across videos of people getting attacked. I would find it on news sources, friends just reposting the video, and just on my timeline. As online activism became more popularised, it was rare to not run into a violent video. This became extremely emotionally labouring. Something like going on my phone was something that I did for leisure, but it has become the exact opposite. But I also felt guilty if I just kept scrolling and skipped the video, as people would often say how ignoring it is also the problem.

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For this work today, I wanted to convey the feeling of information being shoved into you no matter what kind of platform you’re on. So I used a low shutter speed to capture the movement of me trying to look for a place where a phone isn’t there.

To create this final image, I photographed myself holding my phone in different ways, almost like i was trying to show it to somebody. I then removed the background and put them on top of the portrait photo of myself. Looking at it now, I should’ve adjusted some of the sizing of my arm and phone. They’re all similar with the sizes so it lacks some dimension.

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I will definitely stick to this simple monochromatic colour palette that I’ve been using for the past couple days. And as this brief is coming to an end, I would like to push out maybe 2 more finals.

Today I tried to develop more on my theme of emotional labour. For this shoot, I photographed it at night. This was to get my background to be as dark as possible, to set the mood that I want to give off. I’m really pleased with the outcome, especially the blue tone that my images have. I added colours in my photo this time and this was very successful overall. The plain background allowed me to draw all the attention to myself. I really like the minimalism of these series. I wanted to depict the idea of suppressing ones emotions in this series. Especially with the bottom image, I wanted to show how I am trying to keep everything inside.

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Overconsumption of the Media

This image touches on the idea of taking in too much information from social media. Everything is pretty self explanatory, but I wanted to develop more on the last photo series I made of my face getting sucked up into my phone.

Pavel Banka

I think you can see a lot of inspiration from Pavel Banka in my images. The overall minimalistic look and the long shutter speed really resembles his style.

Something I wanted to work on for my work was photo manipulation. Although I don’t hate the photos that I’ve created, I wanted to try new things as I started to get repetitive with my work.

For this photograph, I went with the idea of a part of you (literally) being taken away. Since I don’t have a lot of experience with photoshop, I am seeing some flaws that I have made. But taking the fact that I am a photoshop beginner into consideration, I am somewhat happy with the end result. Although the composition and placing of things are a bit off, I think this is a good start to developing my ideas with photoshop.

Usually my shutter speed is pretty high (at about 1/125 – 1/250). And the lowest it would gets is at about “1. But for this shoot, I wanted to go even longer with my shutter speed to see the kind of result I would achieve. For today, I left the shutter speed on for about 4 seconds. I am pretty happy with the results, so I want to see how I can use this to develop my final work.

For this series, I wanted to move away from black and white a bit and bring in some colours. The concept of this shoot is repressing emotions. When people try to hide their emotions, it ends up making it show even more ( as seen on the image on the right). I think for a lot of people, repressing ones emotions is an attempt to run away from the the feeling you’re avoiding. But it ends up becoming so emotionally labouring, as you think of it more than you would. Repressing your emotions also means you’re on your own. Not having anyone to help out. This makes everything more labouring.

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Today I wanted to test out how my photographs would turn out at night time. These photos don’t quite relate to the topic of emotional labour, but it was nice to explore different ways to shoot images. This was a new experience for me. I had a lot of fun getting creative with finding new ways to light up my room.

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I decided to explore further on with the concept of leisure becoming labour. For this photo sequence, the idea was to portray the feeling of being trapped in your own space. I feel like a lot of people during this time, feels like their home went from feeling like home, to feeling like a prison. For me, I am definitely slowly starting to get sick of constantly being in my room!

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This photo above represents the idea of losing concept of time. When your daily routine gets taken away, you lose structure in your life. Especially in the lockdown we had last year, my sleep schedule and the time when I would eat my meals became heavily distorted. I would often wake up at 1pm and have my “breakfast” at 2pm, and go to bed at around 3-4am. As my ideas continue to develop, I would like to get more into photo manipulation in my photos.

After our online class ended, I started planning and photographing my first draft. I liked the idea of mixing the concept of labour and leisure. An activity such as going on your phone, is something that is seen as leisure. But these days, it becomes very labouring; Since now all I see on the phone is everything going wrong with the world. This photo series is all about that. Within this body of work, I wanted to depict how this form of leisure has become something that is now emotionally draining and stressful. For me, my screen time on my phone has increased quite a bit. I read a lot about the covid updates, which does make me a bit anxious.

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Body language was my way of conveying the emotions to the viewer. I used a low shutter speed quite a lot when I was taking my photos. This was to show that I was not sitting still calm, but stressed and fidgety. The bottom right image was to show how My face is going in to my phone, as I consume a good amount of information about all the bad happening these days.

This video titled “take a break” is an animation that I made today. It also touches on the concept of over-consuming the news through your phone, which is something that becomes emotionally labouring. I went with the same formula as my previous animations. This is about the fear and worries that this new covid outbreak has created within Aotearoa.