This was my response:
‘Desire/Despair'
Desire and Despair are twins (Gaiman, 1992). They are not identical twins but twins indeed. They are not quite opposites and they are not the same but they are twins. They have a likeness that is at times uncanny, where one often displaces the other. Both have the power to blind and blur reality. Both encourage repetitive actions, that make us, as Freud would say, repeat disaster in love and in life. (Edmundson. 2003 p.vii)
“Repeating in them comes out of them, slowly making clear to any
one that looks closely at them the nature and the natures mixed up
in them. This sometimes comes to be clear in every one.”
Stein, G. (2006)
Twins have a likeness that is more one than the other. The nature of desire is the continuous longing, the incredible heart-wrenching feeling in your chest, the bursting feeling in your head, the tingles in your tummy when you see, hear, feel, touch, taste, that which you desire. So similar is the nature of despair, the continuous ache, the incredible heart-wrenching feeling in your chest, the numb feeling in your head, the endless want for something other than despair.
There is an intensity with which they both induce a self-centred disposition. To be completely wrapped up in desire is to be thinking only of how to achieve, how to get, have, obtain your object of desire. To be engulfed in despair, is to stop trying. To lose hope in the world and always look to the negative, always numb. Freudians would say that once “our idealisations dissolve, the honey-glow disappears, and we’re tolled back, as Keats has it, to our sole selves...disillusioned, void of life, and waiting for the next falsehood.” (Edmundson. 2003 p.viii)
‘Desire/despair’ is the in-between. Beyond desire. Beyond despair. The meeting point, if you will, after desire has built you up so high and despair has pummelled you down to the darkest depths. I aimed for the final image to capture the blank void.
Gaiman says that Desire is androgynous, of “medium height” and briefly flashes a “knife-like smile”. The colour of desire is red, passionate deep red. Despair, on the other hand is grey:
“Her skin is cold and clammy; her eyes are the colour of sky on the
grey wet days that leach the world of colour and meaning; her
voice is little more than a whisper. Despair says little and is patient.”
Gaiman, N (1992)
I had twin models for the shoot, Alice and Iz Lindsay. I intentionally avoided making one twin Desire and the other Despair as the similarity between the two was important. To achieve this, I looked to the styling. They wore almost identically androgynous stylings with a grunge feel: skinny jeans, grey t-shirts, checked flannel shirts (different patterns) and ox-blood red Dr Martens boots and shoes. The make-up was simple, exactly the same, making their eyes slightly squarer which made them look a little masculine. The difference was in the hair, Alice has a blonde short square boy crop and Iz has a half head of bright red hair styled in a victory roll at the front. Blonde = despair, red = desire, perhaps.
The shoot was done in low light and daylight as I wanted to push my comfort zone of using well lit, clean images and achieve a variety of textures to use in post production. I began to experiment with different compositions involving splicing one twin, repeating the section and placing it over or next to the whole twin to achieve a sort of split personality effect. This produced mixed results.
At the presentation I said nothing I had intended, it came out all wrong as per usual. I never mentioned any theorists to back me up, I rambled and didnt make it clear what I was trying to say. But I think some people understood. I handed in one final image along with two concertina booklets of all the variations I tried out in photoshop. I wanted the final image(s) to look fragmented but solid. I must have made some sense as my mark, albeit the worst mark I have received for my work since term 2 in first year, was 78%. I could have done much better had I came up wth the idea earlier in the term, but that could be said for everything in life, "if only i'd started sooner, if only i'd done this, that blah blah." The point is, I know where I went wrong. I let myself get too absorbed by the group work that I exhausted my brain and had to squeeze my shoot into the week before the deadline. Not a good plan.
