This shoot was quite interesting to conduct as this series represents a situation (I was told about) in which this woman would frequently receive beatings from her fiance. On most occasions, she said  it would normally be on the weekend as that was the time he would go out to the pub and come back drunk. When he was drunk, she said that it was always worse because  he would be more ruthless and it was harder to get him to stop because he was just so angry. She said at least when he was sober, he knew when he was going to far and would just walk away, but when he was drunk, he would go to far and this was when she would end up with bruises and marks all over her body. On one occasion (the situation I am representing), her fiance came home, they argued, he hit her a couple of times and walked out, but only to come back hours later completely drunk and “ready for round two”. She said she was asleep on the sofa, and was dragged into the corner of the room by her hair, and he started to smack and pinch her skin, which then led to punching and kicking  her. She would scream for help, but realised too late that it was a bad idea in the long run as instead of using her body as a punching bag, he would use and beat her face to ‘shut her up’ so to speak. This incident, she said was the worst one and she dragged herself into the bathroom – after he passed out on the floor – to clean herself up. She was horrified at the reflection staring back at her. She said the bruise was already evident on her eye and her lip swollen and chin bleeding. When discussing this situation together, I asked her whether she had ever thought about leaving him, to which she responded that she already tried to, but when he figured out what she was doing; he forced her into their bedroom, and explained how if she ever leaved, he would ‘make her pay’. Also, she explained how he had grown quite close to her family and she feared that he would go after them or make them suffer in her place. She said that no matter what, she was not going to marry him and she stuck to her word. In the end, she fortunately got away and moved here to Jersey (her parents where moving house so she didn’t have to worry about her ex-fiance doing anything to them). From old friends, she found out that he had actually got another girlfriend, so that definitely eased her mind and sort of assured herself that he would never go looking for her.

The model I used for this shoot was not the actual person who had been in the abusive situation and I applied make-up in order to replicate a bruise (similarly to how she had described it to be). It was very convenient that she already had a bruise on her arm from an accident at work, thus I used that to my advantage and used it it quite a few of my shots. A way that I could have improved these images was to perhaps include more of the environment around her, she (the victim) explained to me how messy the place would get and how she would spend hours cleaning up. I could have incorporated this to create more of an authentic feel throughout this body of work.