Mind

While negotiating a stressful time in my life, I noticed that during the routine of everyday events, like completing homework or spending time with friends, my mind would wander into thoughts of the difficult things that were occurring in my life. I would soon catch myself and realize that I had left the “real world” and had missed a portion of what was actually going on around me. The mind can momentarily take a person away from the world in which they live and put them into a different state of being. My series, Mind, captures these moments, where the mind floats away into disjointed thoughts and leave behind the physical world. I examine the mundane moments in peoples’ lives; the times that I notice my own mind starting to drift. I plan the images out ahead of time to create an atmosphere that appear dreamlike and clearly not of the real world. While locations are primarily left as they are found, the use of external lighting techniques illuminate the scenes to enhance the unnatural feeling of the space, accenting the subjects within my photographs. I light the scenes in a cinematic way to reference the ability of a movie to take an individual away from the real world, just as the mind can. The final photographs are composed from multiple images and manipulated in a fashion that illustrates the way the mind can also fabricate and manipulate reality to create an imaginary, perfect world where the stressful events in my life fade away.