I think out of all the assignments I’ve engaged with thus far, this has to be my favourite. The level of understanding that I’ve built through working through the exercises in the first couple of parts of this module, have helped hugely in the development of ideas with regard to visual story telling. I definitely feel like I’m gaining more confidence in developing and representing my ideas.
When finally settling on an idea for Photographing the Unseen – that being PTSD. I wrestled with a couple of different outcomes for its conclusion. I talked to Martin (I don’t like the term subject as I think it dehumanises) at great length – over two hours in fact. We covered lots of ground during this time including reasons for his enlistment; early postings; serving in Iraq; the horrors of what he experienced; post army life; the manifestation of his PTSD; dark days; psychotherapy and help groups and finally his gaining of confidence and new friends through our martial art group.
Whilst talking, the most reflective he became was when he talked about his experience of suicidal thoughts. This was when I made the portrait image of him. For some time, I thought of representing this in my set of images, which is why I made the image below.
I decided it was important to portray a more positive story though and realised that Martin would be better served by focusing on his healing. For this reason, I swapped the knife for the MMA gloves as I think these have a dual meaning. They represent the fight he’s endured with his psychological scars and also, they symbolise the healing process of his martial arts journey and the new friends and confidence he has gained.
There was one other idea that I had an about turn with. At one stage I considered representing the metaphorical images through a coloured filter. I thought that this might indicate stress, pressure, trauma, blood and may work well to ensure a more allegoric reading of the work. I’m still unsure, I might still change my mind and put them in. Maybe.
Finally, I thought it was really important that the text used was hand written. As it was Martin’s testimony verbatim, I felt that it would add to its authenticity if it was appearing from his own hand. Actually, it was written by my hand, but I don’t think it matters so much in this case as I’m not stating that it is his writing, it is done merely to add weight to his words.
Context and Narrative 