Balls of Titanium Steel

Hollow.
Craving hunger, burning in the pit of my stomach. No, don’t give in. Be strong. More duct tape on the fridge. Close the door. Always closed. Someone look in and see her; save me from myself. No, it’s not self pity it’s empowerment. Control. Don’t succumb. So weak. So afraid to eat. Exhale. Press in. Fear: food, the devil; food, the only comfort. Fill up my wracked and empty self with something. ANYTHING. Stuffing in pieces. Dribbling out onto the floor. Trance. Can’t stop it. No control. Why is she doing that. Stop eating. STOP.
Consciousness fades back in too fast. Despair. Crumbs. Clean it up. Throw it all away. It didn’t happen. I didn’t slip. I'm strong. Stronger than food. Get it out. Out of me. JUST GET IT OUT. I just want to be free. I can see me. So light. Free. What am I now? Just trapped by my own neurosis. My own doing. Look in and see me. Save me from myself. Don’t let me succumb.
Obsession exposed.
My semester-long photography project started out as a cliché printed image of a peach sitting in the warm August light and ended up as a hand bound book that investigated an overpowering struggle with weight and food. The process of digging for a concept that I was passionate about and wanted to explore in great detail with no fear of what I might find and finally executing it is almost more important to me than the work itself. Creating that book was extremely cathartic, and allowed me to step outside of my obsession and approach it in an artistic manner that still incorporated all of the angst and hollowness that I felt. The book was successful as a series of photographs in the end result because I was so tied to the work and my whole self was in the process and execution. Art to me can never be half-hearted; it has to be an internally wrenching ordeal that sucks every bit of life out of your soul and puts it on paper, exposing your most vulnerable parts to strangers. However, I rarely start at this deep revealing level but instead slowly (and painfully) progress there.
I started the project i am trying with an undefined concept of expressing narrative through photos that explored the relationship between humans and inanimate objects, but with a lack of human form. This concept was very vague and had no grounding in something that I was passionate about or that was an issue that I could really delve into and get to the guts of. I started making photographic sketches of my concept to try and ground it into something more concrete, which is how I arrived at the horribly cliché and trite picture titled “Peach on a Staircase”. This would become my nickname in my photography class for the rest of the semester and would be referenced every time someone made bullshit art. However, this image holds great weight for me, for it was the marker in a change of thought -- of having the drive to search for something that held meaning and I was deeply tied to. Another one of the photographic sketches was of my hand smushing a tomato on my dirty and mismatched kitchen tile floor, which was the photo that pushed me into developing my project. I realized at that point that I kept moving back towards images that were self-portraiture and incorporated the concept of food or eating. Only when I moved outside of an aesthetic approach to making an image and instead captured a confrontation of my self with my self did the image hold significance. My obsession with food was unavoidable and I recognized that photographically exploring that obsession would be the strongest series I could make.
I continued with my photographic sketches, since that method of working allowed me to be able to get away from the technicalities of photography and not worry about the validity of the photo as art but instead as a tool to explore a concept. In the sketches I did over the next 4 weeks I pushed myself to reveal more and more to the camera about my neurosis. I photographed myself in my underwear, clutching folds of skin and pressing them against each other. I photographed myself sitting on the toilet after taking laxatives and pressing my stomach in in pain. I photographed myself screaming at my refrigerator. I photographed myself stuffing cake into my mouth and crying. I photographed my three scales. These sketches became a point from which I could concretely grasp the concept I almost had in order to start making decisions on how to focus it. I could then look through the sketches and pick out which elements were working in the photos to convey the struggle with weight and food and the resulting approach to my body.
All while I was working on these sketches I was referencing artists that dealt with body image. Researching the explorations that have preceded mine is always an important step in my artistic creation, for the work that I make will be viewed in reference to the existing work. I find that it also pushes me to explore other avenues of presenting the concept and innovative new ways of art making. Marilyn Minters photographs deal with sensuality and the underside of glamour, and in an indirect manner reference body image. Photographs such as Stuffed (2003) and Drool (2003) pushed me to investigate photographing my mouth;s relationship with food in an intensely uncomfortably personal manner. Without looking at her work, I wouldn’t have come up with extreme close-up’s of stuffing marshmallows into my mouth and gagging with my mouth full of lettuce. Her work also informed me of aesthetic decisions not to take to sexualize the documentary of eating/not eating. Messy porn (food fetish) formed a bracket on the other end of the spectrum of all the decisions not to take in completely fetishizing food and making it about sex, not a neurosis. However, looking at sites like www.sploshme,com showed me that fetishizing food could help me accomplish my goal of life revolving around food and the conflict of loving it, but being ashamed of it. These two components of my research were invaluable and the most influential on my finished product, for it formed a continuum on which I could place my own work and have it operate within an existing context but in an original manner.
Other artists that I looked at helped me to make more aesthetic decisions and less conceptual investigation. Cindy Sherman’s photos of vomit, referencing bulimia from the mid to late 1980’s, pushed me to explore images that were unsaleable to the viewer and intensely disturbing to view in their rawness and veracity. Her photos have a grittiness that I tried to incorporate into my own cleaner aesthetic to help reveal in a purely visual manner my concept of the conflict within the self. Jenny Saville’s work, which deals with the painterly depiction of folds of flesh in unnatural angles, helped me to see the path I could take in making an overweight body look even more disgusting. Combining these artists’ aesthetics with my more conceptual research, I had a firm foundation on which I could build my own project.
Once I finished exploring the information derived from my photographic sketches and research, I was ready to embark on making the final aesthetic decisions in expressing my concept that had become concrete. I chose from the start to present the final series of photos in a book format, for that format is much more personal than a print on a stark gallery wall. I decided upon the title of i am trying to make the subject matter more open-ended and accessible to more viewers. I think that the unfinished title sentence adds a dimensionality to each photograph that it would not have if I had titled it (for example) obsession. I knew that this project had to be a series of photos, for the repetitiveness is important; it visually represents the overwhelmingly inescapable obsession that invades my entire life. I was aiming for between 10 and 20 images, which would work in a narrative manner -- with a beginning, climax, and ending. I knew the images needed to have an interplay of zooming in and out, and display emotions that conflicted with one another in order to portray the complicated reality.
In order to successfully display all of these specifics, I needed a blank canvas with very few visual stimuli in order to purposefully focus the viewer. For that reason I chose white seamless with studio lighting, and decided to wear the same pink underwear in all the shots with minimal makeup, simple earrings and necklace, and no specific hairdo. At this point I was already visualizing how the images would work in the book and had decided on a specific size. I had also determined that the images would be cropped to the bleed on the fore-edge of the book in order to conceptually show that the book cannot completely encase the images. I also consciously chose each of the foods that would be portrayed in the shots; nothing that was photographed was to be accidental, for this project was intensely conceptual. In that manner, all the work had been done at this point, and execution was the only step left in realizing my vision.
The actual execution of i am trying took about 3 weeks, during which I was shooting, printing, reviewing, and re-shooting constantly. I immersed myself so completely in the process that I began to only be able to eat when I was shooting. To get the perfect shot of hungry eyes I fasted for three days and then shot myself in a state of utter exhaustion and unrefined hunger. During the process I was continually pushing myself to dig a little deeper, to reveal a bit more to the audience and completely rip off my protective shell. This wrenching confrontation was so personal that I found that I could only get to a deep personal level when I was completely alone, so all of the images were shot with a remote shutter release. Being in my apartment studio without any judging eyes allowed me to supercede conventions and norms and reach a point where the images because powerful in their rawness and originality.
When I had finished shooting, revising the images, laying them out in a format that conveyed the narrative I wanted, printed the images, and hand-bound the book I reached a point where I felt stronger than my neurosis. I had been able to take as much as I could out of me and present it visually for the world to see. Due to that I earned my second nickname in my photography class: balls of titanium steel. My professor commended me on being able to fearlessly expose my (in very many ways usually cliché) disorder in a fresh way that chronicled an obsession in a way that everyone could relate to.
The process of making the book, albeit painful, was therapeutic and cathartic in a way for it allowed me to jump headfirst into my neurosis and explore it objectively and emotionally through my photography. Also upon the completion of i am trying I felt a partial release of the pain and exhaustion and an inner torment that had completely enveloped me for an entire semester. My neurosis that for so long I hadn’t been able to acknowledge or explore had emerged in a powerfully emotional photography narrative. I finally reached a point in my development of an artist where I could reach that raw visceral part of my soul and expose it artistically. The development of reaching that point became intrinsically tied to I am trying through the process of developing my concept. The result book i am trying represented a huge leap in my artistic development as well as a raw exposure of an eating disorder and the accompanying neurosis.