Heretique – Tragic Asylum 8

Steven Perdikis

Context and Background

The year is 2007. I’m in my second year of University. I am studying an Undergraduate Degree in Visual Art, and I’m taking a digital photography class. I am tasked with making a photo book. The theme is portraiture. These are those images.

An essay should accompany this body of work, I’m told. There should be a theme that ties it all together. I have no idea what, or who to use as a portrait subject; other than those surrounding me in my class. I’m interested in the imagery evoked by an enormous cohort of “Gothic Metal”, and I use this as my basis, with my visual style leading more to Romanticism than Goya.

As we’ll see throughout this series of images, however; there’s a bit of obvious darkness throughout! Each image is inspired by a single song.

Image 8: Heretique

A very literal interpretation of the misnomers of the “Gothic”, throwing a pentagram into the mix. This was to create a casual link with the “anti-church”, and an embrace of “the darkness”. I’m still not entirely sure what I was trying to achieve with this image, inspired by the Tristania song of the same name.

It is about surrender, to some extent “Accept the modesty / Falter through spears of the pain / Exhausted hours .. exhausted hours / Nothing from thy world will remain thine / except the privilege to die.“

That last name really says it all – and was a reflection on what I was experiencing at the time – confusion over my father’s death, and struggling from a brush with that very same fate myself.

More About this image

Shot again with that magical D80 – a camera I sorely miss! I wish I could remember what lens I used for this shoot – it comes back as one of the best “usable shots” : “shots taken” ratio. Thank goodness for meta-data.

Lens used: (the meta data doesn’t actually tell me!)

There’s focal ranges of 28-90 for this shoot, so I’m going to hazard a guess and say it was the Nikon 28-135 which was a popular kit lens at the time I took this shoot. I wasn’t using anything high end at the time.

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