take clothes for instance BOOK

THE PROJECT
Take clothes for instance: An examination of
temporality and our frail attempts at
immortalising ourselves.
Having carried out some research and experiments on ill-fitting
clothing, and reflected on these as well as on the nature of why
people have photographs of themselves taken, I wanted my
project to comment on the temporality of the photographic
image and what many people’s expectations are of it when they
are depicted in portraits; that this photograph will represent me
as my ideal self, and will thus capture this moment for all time.
The tableaux nature of some of the photographs I intended to
take I hoped would reflect a time when photographs depicted
classic static poses, but I also wanted to juxtapose these with a
clear expression of the contradiction of things changing through
time. Clothes which had once fitted but didn’t any more I thought
would epitomise this. I also wanted to look at ways in which
clothing could look like anything other than that which would be
considered as ideal; clothing that people would prefer not to see
themselves in, and so clothing which fitted badly and was
misaligned I felt would express this. To further break down the
conceit of the photograph being of one moment in time I
intended to take the photographs into a post-production stage. In
Adobe Photoshop I would mix time up by blending and
compositing two or more photographs, and therefore I would be
bringing different moments together. This would further expose
the conceit of the seamless momentariness which photography
often infers. In doing all these things my ultimate aim was to
create a multi-layered, multi-temporal montage which
interrogated attitudes towards clothing, identity and time.
The nature of the next photo session would be again
experimental and the outcome would be dependent on the
surprise performative aspects that my collaborators, my
volunteers and the clothing would bring to the project.