Final Valedictory Pieces

The central idea of my valedictory project is the exploration of the psychological disorder schizophrenia.  Schizophrenia is a disorder that causes someone to have multiple personalities that they cannot control.  It also includes delusions, hallucinations, unorganized thinking, and abnormal social behavior.  Symptoms usually begin to show during young adulthood, but only about 0.3-0.7% of people are affected by it.

 

 I studied this disorder in my psychology class and I was very intrigued by it.  Psychology is my favorite class, and I want to major in psych in college.  In particular, my favorite part of psychology to learn about is abnormal psych.  For my valedictory project I wanted to showcase artistically what goes through the minds of people with schizophrenia.  People with this disorder uncontrollably change their personalities within an instant.  There are so many different sides of them.  They could be perfectly content one second, and then start to feel absolutely insane.

 

For this project, I used myself as a model for every picture.  I think that it is much easier to have yourself model than someone else, because this way you can get every shot and position to be exactly as you envision it.  I wanted there to be a lot of emotion in the photographs, and its hard to get someone else to express that if they don't know exactly what you want.  I wanted my pictures to have sort of a "creepy vibe" to them.  Having schizophrenia obviously isn't a very enjoyable thing, so I wanted my pictures to show that.  Also, my favorite types of pictures are ones with a dark tone to them.  To do this, I made them all black and white, and I made them all purposely grainy.  To create the first two shots, I used a self timer and a low shutter speed, and shook just my head (so that the body would be semi-clear).  To create the last to shots, I used a self timer and positioned myself in different places, then created chrono pictures with photoshop.  I really enjoy how my photos turned out and I am glad that they came out how I wanted them to look.