Cindy Sherman was here!

I’m so excited to get started on my digital project! The ideas are there, it’s conceptually rich, but I’m having trouble actually reaching the execution. A self-portrait project building upon ideas of reflection and the male gaze  around Poe and Hitchcock’s themes is so promising, but I need a few things to happen before I can even get to taking the pictures:

• Make the website: essentially a photography portfolio
• Request AV  equipment (lights and tripod) from Macaulay
• Contact the peeps! (Make-up artist, hair/stylist, photographers and computer savvy individuals) Bribe them with food.
• Draw up conceptual thumbnails. This would ensure that my shooting day is structured and that I won’t forget any important shots.
• The clothes! I’m not going for absolute replication of either of the films, but even for a modernization I want to have something aesthetically close to what Hitchcock wanted his actresses to look like. Maybe a visit to H&M would be promising (and cheap!).
• Rent a space. I have a contact at the NYPL branch by my apartment in the Bronx who might allow me to use the building’s lower level, as long I exchange services (face painting for events or a workshop for teens over the summer).

And that’s all there is, haha…Once the photos are taken, the physical Poe texts need to be scanned, the images need to be edited, and everything needs to be uploaded to the portfolio (which I will begin working on now to save me from any future headaches).

I’m still trying to understand the main point of this project myself, but it would be worthwhile to think about it now since I need to convince a bunch of friends to help me out. I would say that this is a feminist revisitation of the worlds that two men, Poe and Hitchcock, released to the public well before my time. My project is an intervention, calling attention to how women were represented in the works of these two masters of the macabre: ideals, goddesses, forms to be molded, objects of desire and destruction. I want these photographs to represent the artistic ideas my works have come to be associated with: self-identity, questionable femininity, fantasy (not the Tolkien kind), and horror. Gore is not my goal, but I’d like my audience (horror aficionados, Poe and Hitch fans, artists, the Goth kids on the dark depths of Tumblr, etc.) to understand what I’m going for.