For my first shoot, I chose to represent the fear Somniphobia, the fear of falling asleep.
As I am currently in isolation, I'm not able to take pictures of anyone but myself or my partner, so for this image I decided to photograph myself. I decided to photograph my eyes and have them really wide open, but I found this didn't look the way I wanted it to. So I decided to use some tape to keep my eyes open - this way I could appear to be trying to stay awake.
Here are all of the images I took for this shoot. Not all of them were successful, some were too over exposed or underexposed, or the shadows were too harsh.
The inspiration behind this shoot was Alfred Hitchcock's films 'The Wrong Man' and 'Psycho'. The focus the viewer has on the eyes in each of the stills was something I wanted to recreate. I thought cropping the image to a more panoramic style would make you only be able to focus on one thing, this would also make it look like more of a film still.
I also wanted my image to be black and white, much like the ones below - the high contrast and grain in the images drew me to them more.
This is the final image, I decided to call it Ýpnos - Greek for sleep.
I feel the image is a successful and strong one - the folds in the skin being created by the tape draws you into the eyes, and the eyes staring directly into the camera is slightly disturbing and unsettling.
I like that the image is in black and white, it makes it slightly eerier and means there are no distractions from bold colours. However, I also tried the image in colour.
To me, the black and white image is stronger than the one in colour - there is more detail to be seen and the colour of the tape doesn't distract you from the eyes.
-Ýpnos
- Somniphobia-
Phobos-