My concept for my final Advanced photography photo shoot was inspired by the challenges my friends, family and I faced during this past year. Basically, we are all in our early 20’s juggling work, school and a variety of other issues that can become physically, emotionally and psychologically draining on a person’s well being. Speaking for myself and what I’ve experienced from others these various challenges can take us to very dark and negative spaces in our minds, so I want to do a portrait shoot depicting that. I want the shoot to be transitional going from a depressed, stressed, overwhelming and dark feeling to something more hopeful and positive like finding light at the end of the tunnel. My subjects will include myself and four other people (family members, friends, spouse). My audience is young people like us who are also going through some of the most difficult times in our lives trying to be successful and live well but at the same time feeling like we’re running out of time. We fall into pits of depression so deep we often become our own worst enemies doubting ourselves and our abilities thinking we’ll never reach the finish line. I want to see this all narrated by the text from Langston Hughes’ poem Harlem. In the dark scenes, I want to see my subjects in a lot of shadow like partial silhouette in the more positive scenes I want a more hopeful light setting. In the dark settings, my subjects will be wearing dark clothes to add to the mood, in the more positive settings they will be wearing clothing and props that depict what their future aspirations or dreams are. All of this will be back lit in the color red because it represents a feeling of pain and anguish but also passion and strength. This idea can also be explored in a still life by photographing objects representing negative behavior like alcohol, drugs, razor blades and objects representing a person’s aspirations like books, art work, cameras, etc. My inspirations for concept and lighting are works from Gregory Heisler, Nick Fancher and Jordan Peele’s poster art for his recent horror film “Us.
Lighting
Concept
Great start. You have so many ideas here. the thing will be to narrow it down.
If you want to use the Langston Hughes poem as your theme, it could be amazing.
The poem is intense and I think the idea of what happens to a dream deferred is so powerful but it is a bit different than your idea to have hopeful and depressed portraits. I read there to be six versions of what happens to a dream deferred: dry up, fester, stink, crust over, sag, explode. You could use a different technique for each. and six people.
or you could shoot three dark depressed portraits and three hopeful brighter portraits. You could use the same three people so that you have a depressed and a hopeful for each.
Please don’t use yourself as a subject. If you can’t get enough models to come in, use your classmates.