A GOLDEN OBSESSION

The Story

A creature emerges from a pool of gold, bearing features of a beautiful woman, with celestial blue eyes speckled with a diamond gleam. Its flesh glows with a metallic flair of the objects that envelope it. It does not gasp for air whe n it appears, perfectly content with being trapped like an artifact mounted on an ancient wall. I name it, Obsession.

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The Photoshoot

At a film shoot for my senior thesis, I was a little sleep deprived and clearly a little loopy. In the middle of a meeting with my best photographer and videographer, Dan, I was prancing around the drawing board (I mean physically prancing around) and going off about this idea of having someone’s head being bombarded with a nonsensical clutter of thoughts (in a literal sense). I had this image in my head of a person’s head coming out of a cluster of lightbulbs, feathers or jewels that represented these unrelenting thoughts. Dan thought I was going mad from lack of sleep and put me to bed so I could take a long nap and think it through when I woke up.

Clearly, the nap only augmented the visual into a culmination of all three elements that I wanted to use to begin with. What was originally supposed to be a series turned into a four hour long photoshoot with a very patient model, a lot of gold makeup, a lot of props and my entire statement jewelry collection. With a costume I had designed for a fashion runway but never photographed coupled with a strong but slightly crazed narrative, this is my vision of “Obsession”: