Assignment Two Written Work

Links for Assignment Two

Assignment Two Photos 

Research    Suicide Forest

 

Initially, I photographed the onomatopoeia of the river and an abandoned road, yet the images were lacking something. I took a break to contemplate and found myself in the woods. In Assignment One I focused on the derivatives of fear with the trees yet now I sought the comfort of the trees. I realised what was missing from the first drafts of Assignment Two. A story. Emotion. I didn’t want to focus on a purely physical journey, I wanted to evade the glib in photography. It needed psychology and emotion…and trees.

I frequently recall my tutors comments from our first phone call, when discussing fear he said “We come from forests – that is the place where we store our fears,”  Following on from Assignment One he suggested I studied Aokigahara, the Suicide Forest in Japan, where hundreds kill themselves each year. Described as a dark place overwhelmed with demons and death, the forest was a place of fear but I saw it as a place of comfort where you could lose yourself and hide from the outside world. How a place could be seen as fearful to some but a comfort to others inspired this assignment. 

At first evocative of the Suicide Forest I was going to attach signs to the trees with messages ‘leave your pain behind,’ ‘you are safe now’ however I felt the story was stronger, told through a poem. I may return to this in a later assignment. 

During the shoot every corner offered another corner. I was intrigued. I was Theseus in the labyrinth, Hansel and Gretel in the dark woods. The only think known was mystery. In my photos, each corner twists out of sight requiring the viewer to turn the page in order to see what is around it. The turning of the page is the action of walking, or flaneurism. I chose to present the images in photobook to involve the viewer and intensify the mystery. A paper version of Google street view almost. The left side depicts the protagonist’s story in the form of my poem. On the right, the photos evoke the story of the trees and their plight. Yet both stories can be told in both ways. 

It captures a feeling of psychogeography, I was unsure where I was headed, so too is the viewer. It is a collaboration, the images are the environment which inspires the flaneur to undertake the journey.   I wanted the images to look dark and capture the feeling of shafts of light catching important elements so worked in Photoshop using the paint tool, in that sense my art did come into it. 

In a first draft I featured only paths, no matter how many pages you turned you reached another corner and another until the conclusion of the fire. However, this was slightly too repetitive and lacked visual interest. I broke up the path with elements revealing what is around each corner, reminiscent of a mystery game they are the clues, elements I came across on the trail. Severed trees. Weapons. How that clue relates to the images is created in the imagination of the viewer. They are a full stop allowing the viewer freedom to interpret. 

The story is clear in my mind but can be interpreted differently by each individual. Is the protagonist going into the wood to end her life, is she seeking answers? Are the images of weapons representative of her pain, her actions or of the trees suffering? In my mind, two stories are portrayed. 

The forest as a means of connection to another world is something that has his roots in many cultures. The Fang people of Cameroon believe trees and forest to be a force which they can communicate with God whilst the Maori of New Zealand believe that the trees are real just like human beings and have their own spirit. 

The story of the trees plight was not planned. It was while I was on the path shooting for the assignment that I started capturing images of the ‘clues’ as well as the wood. As I turned the corner I was faced with a cloud of acrid blue smoke and saw the trees burning. I stood in awe and realisation. I had gone on a journey but the trees had taken me on their own journey and told me their story of the wood. 

The assignments so far have been an exploration into my relationship with trees, how they were a childhood fear with their witches fingers, then a place of safety which I feel now, a place of magic, the trees themselves, mystical beings. The forest calls to me in a way I can’t quite put into words.

Contextualisation

Richard Longs text works while minimalistic were surprisingly illustrative, the Cloudless day on a blue background conjured such images. For that reason I used a black background with reverse out writing to create the feeling of being inside a dark wood. I discussed earlier about blending photography and art but decided to use poetry and photography. Nadav Kander referenced his photos with the stanza from TS Elliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’ ‘I will show you fear in a handful of Dust’ TS Elliot, to document the wasteland of places left behind after a war. Those ten words encapsulated his work and I was inspired to create a narration in poem form. The feeing of being guided by the trees was partly inspired by Ellie Davis’s work. Her images vary between those of a natural setting to others were she has added mystical elements such as wool draped through the trees forming magical pathways or the row of ferns snaking through the woods into the distance and round the corner. There is that primal urge to follow the ferns even though the destination is as a concealed in the unknown as much as the forest around us. I wanted to create such a feeling yet I used the mystery of what is around the corner of the path to generate this emotion.