the disappointment

These two images are about my deepest destructive self-talk; if I do nothing, I do nothing wrong. And that feeling has its origin in how I felt at my worst. A disappointment. For everyone. (I’m good now, don’t worry! ;-)

I wanted to make this because I had previously made an imagination in a Hannah Marcotti course on this subject. In fact, that was my very first conscious depiction. I discovered at that time and through this exercise from her that I’m a visual thinker. I started reading about it and everything became clear immediately. My busy head and my difficulty with learning. The fact that I always knew where the answer to the question was; how the book looks, how the page looks in terms of layout, left or right, and the precise image of the picture or photo next to it or above it. I can even see the paragraph in my head where the answer to the question I was asked in that exam is. But I couldn’t read the words … Such a shame!

But now that I knew that I was a visual thinker and that images have so much more meaning to me than words, I started to look back on everything I had learned in my therapies and training sessions and why I despite making so many new choices I still was confronted with those old images in my head. I decided to see if conceptual photography based on my old and new emotions could mean something for that bunch of images and flashes in my head.

By feeling/living through all the feelings about that particular situation while taking the self-portraits, I tried to capture it in pictures. And then editing, in color or black and white or with paint or embroidery or whatever, so that it would exactly grasped the emotion. And when that worked out, I felt that instead of old images that were all piled together, I had made a neat row of leaflets. With my new images on the front. If I’m now being triggered in some old pain I do not see those old images but these new images. “Ah, so that’s where this is coming from”. And then I can continue with my life again. I had found my ‘thing’ in photography; depictions/visualisations. And I had enough stuff to work with for a lifetime. ;-)

My first depiction/visualisation. Made in ‘Surrender’, an online cicle of Hannah Marcotti in February 2015