Land Of Make Believe

Ok, so iv just started my Gap year of travelling. The plan is to go 42 days round Europe then & months in Australia. So far I’m in my second country: Berlin. I hope to make posts daily or every couple of days to keep a record of what I did that day,
Woke up today, absolutely hanging. After a quick shower to wash the smell of the previous nights pub crawl off my skin me and my friend set off for the centre. It was boiling hot for the first time since I started this trip which was great.
East Side Gallery :)

Photographer’s Block!

At the moment, at uni, we are all having to come up with our proposals for our final major project. This is the one project in the whole year that actually gets marked, and guess what… I have no clue what to do! I feel like I have photographer’s block! Normally I find it so easy to come up with ideas for photos, I normally think in pictures and any idea I have will be shaped in possible photos I could take. But at the moment - there’s nothing!

Sooo im just going to type out my ideas and hope, that by writing them down, the way to refine them down will become clear.

Ok my first idea was to do something to do with identity. This stems from my own experiences as I feel like I don’t know my own identity, sure I know what I look like, but is our appearances our identity? I could change who I look completely and still be me. I want to travel to try and find myself, its a wierd expression, but everytime I do some new and crazy, that i’ve never done before I learn something new about myself. I think that If I went travelling, throw myself out there into the unknown then I’d know my self better. I think that this links to my other idea of escaping reality pretty well, as going travelling is just a way to disconnect yourself from everything, to quit your job, finish your subjects, not give a shit about the clothes you wear or how you have your hair, coz your away from everything in your culture, it is in a way, escaping reality as reality to you, is your life and travelling means your turning away from everything in your life inorder to find yourself and create a better life.

I love the saying by noel fielding; ‘Reality depresses me, I need to find fantasy worlds and escape in them’. Iv written about reality before, and how I think that everything young people do is to escape reality so they don’t have to come to terms with growing up. At the moment I am having to chose a Uni course and I dont have a clue what to do, having to think about the future about doing a degree then getting a job then trying to find somewhere to live while working all the time to support yourself, it just seems like my childhood is over and I have to start to act and become an adult. But instead of thinking about all this, it’s so much easier to turn away and ignore it, jump into fantasy worlds and forget about everything.

I think that there is no way I can create work on this project without doing a construction for my photos, but I want them to be portraits as I am a portrait photographer.  I need to show how our appearance isn’t our identity and the questioning of what is, what is real and our desire to escape reality, escape who we are and find our true self, our true identity.

My teacher suggested the title ‘behind the facade or behind the veil’ as a title, I quite like this idea as its all about lifting surface appearances and discovering what underneath. I think that thi project could work pretty well as a self portrait project, exploring myself, but I think that would be very hard!

unfortunately, writing it all down didnt really help me refine it down much and I still have no idea what i’m doing, but it was worth a try!

tattoo or not to tattoo!

I really want a tattoo but Im such an indecisive person, there’s no way I could choose what to have done, and if I did, i’d only hate it the next day!

Wish I could make decisions, about anything! But I can’t - I think too much!
But I do love tattoos.