Disposed Ideas of Project (2/2)

I’ve been taking landscape photography for a while. And I’m totally new for portrait photography. However, I find portrait photos is very interesting because every time the person I captured always come up with some things I didn’t expected. Thus I decided to challenge myself and chose portrait photography as my final project.

I was inspired by a video named “How to pose a friend who’s not a model”. These YouTubers invited their non-model friend and took them beautiful and professional portrait photos. It remind me of my friends, fantastic and nice girls but don’t like their looks. So I firstly thought about taking beautiful photos of my friends to show them and encourage them to love who they are.

However, after discussion, we found my project was more like a modelling project rather than a photography project. Thus, maybe I should change my idea into illustrating a person’s deeper or hidden emotion.

I invited one of my friends in Bialystok, Weronika, to be my model. We shot for the whole day, walking randomly on the street and talking about her life. I asked her a lot of questions, about her thoughts and what she’s happy about and struggling with.

She’s only 18 years old, particularly a young adult. She’s 187cm tall but with a baby face. She’s energetic and curious about the world, and she’s fighting for her future. But sometimes she feels so hopeless and powerless, doesn’t know what to do or how to make a difference. When she’s talking about her childhood memories, all I see is smiling faces, positive and yearning tones. But when she talked about the things happening these days, she seemed to feel complicated and confused, extreme happiness or sadness, extremely hopeful or hopeless.

I found it meaningful to try to show her complicated thoughts as a young adult, about the contract on her body and in her mind. To illustrate a period that everyone has or needs to be overcame.

These are some of the photos.