Recently in my program, we’ve been reading Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Naturally, my professor thought that our project should be about creating our own personal hell since Dante’s all about that.  It ended up being a really fantastic project that helped many people in my program, including myself, deal with a lot of our own demons. Everyone came in with something totally different from everyone else’s work which was a really cool thing to see.

It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do my photos; this was partly due to the fact that I’m scared of everything so I didn’t know where to start. I decided my first two pictures would be based on just my anxiety and my ability to overthink every little thing in my life. When I’m left alone with my thoughts for a long time it often makes me feel like I’m being pulled in a million different directions. I decided to use this literally and tied my hair up to a boom in a bunch of directions so that it would look like my thoughts were in fact pulling me all over the place. I used a red gel to light all of my photos as a representation of the anger that comes with my fears.

I’m terrified of the dark, like absolutely hate it. I recently needed to get something from my car, which was about 30 feet from my front door (if that). As I opened the front door to go get it, I heard a noise in the trees outside and immediately turned around and went back inside where I proceeded to make my partner go get what I needed from the car. Needless to say, the dark is not my friend so for part of my project, I decided to try and create the face that I see in the dark that keeps me from going into it. This turned into a weird mix of Coraline and a clown, which actually works because I’m terrified of both of those.

Taking some of these anxieties that I have and making them visible and real actually ended up being helpful in the end. I felt better having confronted those fears and acknowledging them as a part of my life. I still won’t be going on into the dark anytime soon but I’m continuously getting closer to figuring it all out.