SHANNON O’DONNELL

Shannon O’Donnell is an emerging photographer, focusing on ideas like gender, men and women roles in society, manhood and all sorts of other identity related concepts. She has recently graduated documentary photography at the university of South Wales, and completed media photography and history as subjects for her A-Levels.

Her inspirations include Claude Cahun and she calls her ‘rebellious’ for being one of the pioneers of identity photography. Another inspiration Shannon mentioned to us was the Casa Susanna project where all types of people would gather in the 1960’s, and celebrate what we would call now, LGBTQ. Walter Pfeiffer and Adi Nes (a jewish Israeli who works mainly on work related to masculinity, being a male, manhood stages, masculine roles and war), were also some people whose work interests her.

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”By Your Bedside (2018) is a series of images that I created to compliment my short film, Susan’s Sleep. The images are quite, to reflect my own experience during the time my mother was in a coma. I went mute during this time, isolated myself and kept my emotions inside. The only time that I felt able to express myself was when I was sat by my mother’s bedside. These images convey the surreal movie-like experience I felt while waiting for my mum to wake up.” – Shannon O’Donnell

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Susan’s Sleep is a very personal piece by Shannon made in the last year or two. O’Donnell describes the film she made as a type of personal therapy to help her process a tough part of her life, when her mother was put into a coma. It consists of a series of photos and clips made into a short film. This video she has made includes lots of sounds from the hospital, places behind clips taken by a phone, GoPro and camera, as well as footage from her family archives.The film depicts a scary and very personal experience of not knowing what will happen, and also the experience of living in intensive care. Through this harsh time she recorded audio and film, and now her mother is doing much better after 6 months rehabilitation to help her walk regain good mental health. I personally think it represents a lot of what society is facing today with the ongoing pandemic and how we have to stay strong.