My first photo shoot for my personal project is based on my most recent artist reference by Chris McKenney. I used his ‘self ghosts’ project as a basis for the shoot, using my little brother as the subject as I felt a younger silhouette was representative of the age I started to have conflicting thoughts of my identity. Natural outdoors lighting was used for these images and were set in my garden on walls, around bamboo and oak trees. I had a high level of control as I positioned my brother where I pleased, I made sure I went out when there was reasonable amount of light and when the wind was at a low force so that the bamboo leaves were stagnant. Some of the images were originally overexposed, this was due to the harsh light filtering through the clouds, so I either cropped it out or selected the area and decreased the exposure. I chose black and white to create a cold tone to represent how you feel when you remember a memory that you forgot about and never wanted to think about ever again. These memories can change your mood in an instant and they crop up at the most random times.

The white wall represents the tabula rasa and how we all all born a blank slate, throughout life its in our hands to decide where we belong, what we like and what we want. I used a wide lense to capture the white wall and the brown wood in order to optimize the contrast as well as symbolizing the conflict. The black and white represents the to and through I had with whether I sat in my family.

Oak trees have a much slower rate of growth, its around 0.5m per year. The hands around the oak tree link to each other as it takes them years to grow and so do our hands. It’s the idea that I needed time as a child to get used to the changes like an oak tree it takes a long time to reach your full self.

I used the sheet over his head to symbolize the lack of identity I had and how I didn’t see where my place was in my family. Bamboo can grow 1 mm every 90 seconds, it’s one of the fastest growing plants in the world. In this image bamboo is representative of the divorce and how everything was changing around me and fast but I was stuck in a cycle of conflict and confusion as to how I fit into this change. New step-mum, new step-siblings suddenly I wasn’t the only child, I wasn’t the only women in my dad’s life he had a new wife who I now had to call a step mum whether I liked her or not.

I used the window that was semi-transparent as I wanted to move the focus away from my brothers facial features because your looks are such an important part of you identity. I want to just focus in on his hands to display the fact that identity isn’t just how you dress it’s also your DNA, your fingerprints, your bloodline, who you genetically call family.

Hands were significant to me as I child as I used to fiddle with my thumbs, pick at my fingers and suck my thumb at times of stress they were like a stress mechanism that relaxed me in times my anxiety was high. The window this was taken at is on my side door, no one ever uses it. The side door symbolizes how I felt, my family weren’t ignoring me, I had a purpose but I felt useless.

In this image I wanted to keep in the bathroom as it represents the home I had but how it just felt like a building to me, which is how I feel about my Dad’s current house. The idea that my brother has assess to the house but he feels like he locked outside and he looking in on the rest of his family, hes the outcast. Although he has a family who loves him he fells a distance between them, he doesn’t know if he fits in so he stays outside in order to let the rest of the family get on without friction.

The cardboard box signifies the constant movement to different houses, I have moved to six houses, which were all down to my parents finding new partners. The idea that whenever someone moves they can easily just pack up their worldly belongings and relocate to a new setting.