Pale: Tragic Asylum 7

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 7: Pale

Back again to Within Temptation. Pale, which inspired this song is a track about getting over things, but I instead chose to focus on the suffering that is described in this song.

It is introspective, and self-referential. It is a simple, accessible song with some simple piano, cymbals, and high-ranging vocals: “I have to try to break free/ from the thoughts in my mind / use the time that I have / I cant say goodbye / I have to make it right.”

To be prefectly clear, I wasn’t dying in my second year of University, but the death of my father, and a two week stint in hospital myself certainly didn’t help my outlook on life at a young age, when I was producing this body of work.

More About this image

Shot again on a crappy Fuji S7000 that produced horrible, terrible noise (not even a SLR!). I’m really unhappy with the composition of this image, and I would have gone dead centre for the shoulders were I reworking this image today.

I would also add more hands clutching at the model’s head. I do like the way in witch the tendons in the hand capture this mind-wrenching feeling probably more accurately than any direction I could give Anthea, the model for this shot.

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