The goal of this conceptual photo series was to portray the different ways that addiction can affect someone’s life, aside from the obvious physical health consequences. They are meant to tell a linear story occuring within one day. While the effects portrayed can occur from any sort of addiction, alcohol and nicotine are used in this project to convey the idea.
I aimed to create the photos in a way that they look like stills from a movie. Aside from being a fun added challenge, I believe it helped add to the feeling of the series being one linear story.
RESEARCH
Though I have my own experiences with how addiction affects people, I also did some research into it. Some of the most interesting stuff I found was how addiction affects spirituality: “Addiction tries to make a spiritual experience static. When we are in an addictive process, we want to hold on to the moment, not feeling the discomfort of the longing but attempting to maintain what we feel in an instant. Our spirituality becomes stagnate and the addiction leads us into a deep bondage with a substance or process” (Seckman). Basically addiction causes people to forget about anything long-term and to ignore any feeling of purpose in life and replace that thinking with a fixation on short-term satisfaction in the addiction. Overall, the spiritual life of the addict is replaced with the addiction.
Some of the other research I found was about the typically inaccurate portrayals of addiction in art and media. In a lot of ways drugs and addiction are romanticized, after all media is meant to entertain and an accurate portrayal of addiction is not going to be as entertaining. Additionally, stereotypes of addicts are typically a person who is “downtrodden, unkempt, or out-of-control,” but in reality most addicts “work hard to keep the addiction hidden and present themselves as being productive parts of the mainstream” and try to “manage school, or employment and family commitments” (Rosal, 19). With this in mind I want to make sure the person portrayed in the images look generally normal and avoid any of the typical stereotypes.
References
Rosal, Marcia. “Art and Addiction: Putting a Human Face on Addiction and Recovery.” FSU Museum of Fine Arts, 2011. http://addictionandart.org/Images/currguides/artandaddiction.pdf
Seckman, Jim. “Spirituality and Addiction” MARR Inc., n.d. https://www.marrinc.org/spirituality-and-addiction/
MOOD BOARD
OVERARCHING THEMES
First off, I wanted to portray the need to have the object of addiction with you at all times. So, the first image portrays the person pouring liquor into a travel coffee thermos and then that same thermos appears in every other image. Additionally, the images in the series change in color as the story transitions from morning to mid-day to evening.
To match this idea of a one-day story, the clothing of the individual also transitions throughout the series. It starts off with casual business attire, as the person is going to work. In the third photo the tie gets lost and exposes the cross necklace. And then by the end its just the plain t-shirt with a wine stain on it.
I also thought to slowly make each image have a shallower depth of field to show the loss of focus/control throughout the day of an addict. Unfortunately, this wasn’t something I was able to really achieve especially since they were all self-portraits and I had to set the focus before getting into position. However, I was able to achieve a similar feeling by reducing the shutter speed throughout the series. I was able to incorporate this subtly in my images, the third and fourth image especially incorporate this motion blur. I decided the last image shouldn’t have any blur though as it shows the end of the day and the kind of stillness that comes with that.
FINAL IMAGES
IMAGE 1: Portrays the individual getting ready for work in the morning. Meant to convey the mental work and planning involved in appeasing an addiction as well as introduces the recurring theme of the thermos.
IMAGE 2: Conveys how addictions connect themselves to everyday activities/things to an extent that the person can’t enjoy the normal thing any more without the addiction. The example given is needing to smoke along with morning coffee.
IMAGE 3: Spiritually, addictions can cause people to lose sight of longer-term goals as they focus on a short term fix. Naturally, addiction also replaces the importance of spirituality in many people. This is not necessarily religious spirituality but can include general self-actualization and feeling of purpose in life.
IMAGE 4: Shows the financial cost of addiction. The object of addiction often takes financial priority, and in worst case scenarios can leave the individual sacrificing essential needs to appease the addiction.
IMAGE 5: Social isolation is another common effect of addictions, especially with alcohol addiction. People will often skip out on social events or stay at home to indulge their addiction.
Thank you for viewing this project! I put a lot of thinking and planning in to this series and therefore there was a lot of writing included on this project page and I appreciate you taking the time to look through it!