Body Project

When we were first assigned this project, my initial idea was to simply take lots of portraits of people laughing, because I’ve always thought that laughing pictures tend to really capture a person, and especially their emotion. However, once I realized that might not be the greatest of ideas, since it would just be a series of pretty much the same picture, different subjects, I decided I still wanted to stick with the body, and the idea of capturing an emotion or moment like that. I was really interested in the idea of using a part to represent the whole, and the way just one part of your body can reveal something about the rest of it, or your general demeanor (if it’s the right body part at the right moment). So I was at home one day, just feeling really comfortable, reading a book, and I glanced at my feet for a moment and it really felt like just the image of my feet, how they were there, seemed like it was screaming, “COMFORT.” I got the idea to do a body series about comfort, and only take pictures of people’s hands or feet, but that would imply the entire body was in a state of comfort. I chose hands and feet partially because of seeing my feet that day, but also because all the weird wrinkles and veins and bumps and things on hands and feet are always really fascinating to me, and I thought they would make for a good subject. After taking a bunch of pictures of comfortable hands and feet for awhile, however, I started to feel like they were all coming out generally the same. There are only so many relaxed poses for these body parts, it would appear. At this point, unfortunately, it was getting pretty close to the due date, so I decided not to completely abandon my idea, but instead do a hands and feet study with different activities. If that makes any sense. I wanted to continue with the idea of capturing an entire body’s moment with just one body part. So I made the first image a study of Leisure time, the second an image of Sleep (like I say, I had a lot of pictures of comfortable poses), the third was Balance (I had some people playing Jenga, which forces the players to have really steady, balanced, careful hand movements), and finally, Eating (more ravenous hand movements?). I think the first two were definitely way more successful, probably only because I had way more images to choose from for those. But overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the project.