Fear and ‘Guiling Copesmate Death

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 10: Fair and ‘Guiling and Copesmate Death

The winner for most complicated song name goes to Theatre of Tragedy. This is a complicated, long form song about mourning – death, and all the rituals associated with it. I decided to “flex” my then Photoshop skills for this image.

There’s no less than 8 seperate images making up this composite image. It is focused “after the fact” of the ritual surrounding death, and designed to evoke the “after” – that is to say, all eternity.

I also felt this was pretty challenging, to share an image of just a hand as the “portrait”, with the monument taking place of the main subject.

More About this image

Shot on various cameras, at various times, this image is a hodge-podge. The sky is taken from one shot, the monument in the foreground from another – the background cemetary a different shoot, again, and the trees above in the right hand corner are another image as well.

On top of that, the hand has been placed on the gravestone from a separate image. I had toyed with having the hand “pass through” the stone, and having some ethereal “energies” surround the monument, but figured this would detract from the rawness of the image.

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