Mute Fears

Mute Fears was an experimental project. which I recently undertook when studying for an M.A at de Montfort University. Paul Hill describes this first year as a “license to fail.” Certainly doing something entirely different from my normal full colour digital photography was a valuable and liberating learning experience!

Mute Fears is a series of images about emotions, difficult to articulate and frequently repressed in the waking state. It is concerned with the darker side of the unconscious, with fear of loss, violence and entrapment. The images are real in the sense that something has been captured through the lens. However as in dreams, this apparent reality is deceptive. On waking, sequences which seemed plausibly connected, appear nonsensical, and yet retain a disturbing meaningfulness difficult to define. The viewer is left to muse on the links and the interrelated significance of the images in the same way that the dreamer on waking, ponders the meaning of the dream. In dreams emotions are exaggerated and distorted and identities are lost as figures merge into other beings. In a similar way, the images in Mute Fears lack rational continuity. Certain images repeated throughout, such as the reaching hands, are intended to create a dark unified tone linked with sleep and death.

The decision to use lifeless but lifelike artifacts enabled the fine line between reality and fantasy to be blurred. The doll’s head suggested fragility, the truncated mannequin violent death, the stringed doll vulnerability and the glass head, probing the unconscious: each object suggested different photographic directions.

I decided to use monochrome because it is closer to the abstract, more open to interpretation and consequently an apt way to convey something as enigmatic and elusive as the visual imagery of the dream state.

The dream world was high on the list of surrealist preoccupations and their ideas about the workings of the unconscious mind fascinated me. However, my research led me to the conclusion that the dream world, the world of the unconscious, is generally perceived as belonging more to the realm of painting and cinematography rather than photography. Maybe this is because photography is traditionally associated with capturing the ‘real’ rather than the abstract.

Background research also revealed a variety of reasons behind photographers using human representations. Some use them as fetish objects, others as means of making political statements, others as objects of aesthetic beauty. By contrast, in Mute Fears human representations are used as a way of contemplating and distancing myself from repressed emotions.

Vicki Smith