earlier today i was reading "proust was a neuroscientist" by jonah lehrer. i'm almost done with it, i'm on the chapter about virginia woolf. lehrer talks about how her ideas about the self predate a lot of current neuroscience findings, namely that consciousness is a fragmented disconnected almost random place, only barely bound together that seems like it's constantly about to fall apart, but never does.
in her writing v.w. would describe her characters as having almost split personalities from moment to moment. one second manic, the next calm, the next irrepressible, the next sullen...... it's a remarkable insight into the mind. the idea that there's no real self, just a tumultuous whirlwind of thoughts, feelings, memories, insights...... and that the thing that we call our "self" emerges only when it's thought about, that it's only a story we tell ourselves to explain who we are and why we do the things that we do......
anyways. it was an interesting read. and it got me thinking, how would i represent these ideas in a photograph? i was thinking a multiple exposure situation, with one subject (representing the "self") lit properly, and all the others a sort of blur of color and shape, perhaps each one doing something different, or dressed differently, or something like that.
this is my experimenting with the process that would yield something like that. this isn't a finished piece, i shot a bunch of ambient light long exposures with the camera on the tripod, then adjusted the settings and turned on some lights and shot a proper portrait from the same camera position. bust it all into photoshop, stack it up in the "soft light" layer mode, and there it is.
this is a hack ps job, and nothing like what's in my head, but it's an interesting start, and since i'd never done something like this before, i thought i'd start here before i move on to the whole enchilada.
setup shot:
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