HOME

For this assignment, I chose to focus on the darker, more surreal angle on the
theme of home. Instead of focussing on family and comfort, I chose to focus on
five different feelings that a person may feel when stuck in their own personal
prison:

Depression
Isolation
Suffocation
Imperceptibility
Paranoia
 With this photograph, I wanted to show the dangers of “melting into your sofa” when stuck at home, falling into a lazy
rut and unable to move. Not only does the figure on the left have a blank dark void covering the face to show the
dehumanization of being stuck in an abusive or uncomfortable environment that feels more like a house than a home, but
I also chose to add a stretch effect to the subject’s hands and face to show their merging with sofa as well as the clock in
the back to show that when stuck in a house you call home, time may feel warped and not real.

For the setup, I used the rule of thirds, placing the subject on the left third of the screen, slightly off centre and to add to
the feel of the piece, I turned down both brightness and contrast as well as slightly toning down the warmth of the picture,
before adding a black and white filter and a hint of film grain to make the subject feel blended into the picture as well as
adding a vintage feel, almost imitating an old polaroid camera
 With this photograph, I wanted to show the idea that one’s own home can act as a sort of cage, making
them feel trapped, abandoned or secluded. The windowpanes act as sorts of metaphorical bars on a
cage or cell, showing that some people may feel trapped in their very own homes. It is also ironic that
windows let us see the outside world from our homes, yet stop us from actually experiencing the
outside world, almost like we’re being taunted by the unattainable. To achieve this eerie sense of
claustrophobia, I first cropped the original image to show only the frames of the window, making the
picture include a frame within a frame to show the boxed in nature of the home, I then added a vignette
to darken the outer borders of the image to make it feel like there is nothing beyond the immediate
proximity of the subject, then turning down the overall brightness and slightly turning up the saturation
to make the headlight on the left hand side of the image look like a giant beaming eye looming over the
subject watching their every move, even in the darkness and comfort of their own home
With this photograph, I wanted to show that at home, some people may feel suffocated or claustrophobic,
unable to get a word in, unable to breathe and feel that nothing they say is being taken on. The smudged,
blurry mouth symbolises the feeling of suffocation and the inability to breathe or speak up and I felt that
adding a murky, white eye effect onto the subject would dehumanize the subject in a sense, removing the
windows to the soul and instead replacing them with blank, empty, marble-like orbs that pierce through
the photograph and grab the viewers’ attention, but as you dig deeper and linger on the image longer, you
then realise there is a lot more wrong with the distorted figure. For the setup of this image, I asked my
subject to stand in the centre of the frame to be in the middle third of the image, their eyes being in the
exact centre as they are the main focal point.
For the editing process of this image, I first took an image of the subject using the studio lighting setting
on my camera which creates a blurry, blacked out backdrop, then, I used the stretch tool in my photo
editing software to warp the chin and jaw to seem longer as to give off a ghoulish, wide mouth screaming
pose. Then I used the smudge tool to blur out the mouth completely by matching the skin tone and
covering the mouth and added an image of a marble over both eyes, cropping them to fit inside the eyelid.
Finally, I turned up the contrast of the image whilst also turning down the brightness, adding a vignette to
draw focus to the centre of the image, film grain to age the image and a black and white filter to match the
overall tone of the photograph
 With this photograph, I wanted to show how some people may feel invisible at home, whether it be from
neglection from family or a loved one or from the loneliness of an empty house, even more common this
year due to the lockdown, forcing us all to stay inside. To achieve this effect, I first took a blank template
picture of the hallway, then, without moving the camera I asked my subject to stand in the centre of the
frame within a frame and right in the centre of the two leading lines of the hallway, took another photo.
Going into my photo editing software, I then overlapped the two images and turned down the opacity of the
second picture, giving the effect that the subject is slightly transparent, giving off a ghost-like effect.

To further this effect, I increased film grain on only the template photo to give an old, worn, eerie aura to
the picture as well as turning down the contrast but turning up the brightness to make the lens flare at the
end of hall pop out and cut right through the subject right down the centre of the frame