Assignment:
I’m pretty good at this now.
Well the hard part is the emotion thing. I’ve been struggling with how to get emotion into a photograph for a very long time. Outside of photo journalism where you photograph the raw emotion of an event on a persons face, I am at a loss. There usually is an emotion that I feel when I decide to press the shutter button and capture a scene, but afterwards when I look at the photo, the emotion that I felt, does not appear anywhere in the image! It just evaporated! Sometimes this loss of emotion in the image, is just not working the scene properly, as photographer Robert Capa famously said: “If your photos are not good enough, you’re not close enough”. Other times it is just laziness, I did not really put in the required effort to really look or ‘see’.
For years I loved the 24mm wide angle lens on my Nikon, the natural distortion of that wide of an angle allowed one to put something really close to the lens and make it appear really large in relation to the background. The problem with that technique was, for the most part, I was photographing beautiful mountain scenes with maybe a rock or lake in the foreground, and the mountain would always appear to be falling over backwards, (yep, I wasn’t close enough)!
Ok, back to the assignment. “Use mirrors or reflective surfaces to capture emotion”. When I was young, I would be taken to a barber shop to get a hair cut. Those were scary places. Not that getting a hair cut was scary, but the place of business was. A barber shop was full of customers, big tall giants, who were very sure of themselves and were quite comfortable in telling others of that fact. Anyway when they placed me in the big, tall, barber chair you could look forwards and slightly up, and there was a mirror that showed you sitting in the chair. They also had mirrors on the opposite wall behind the chair placed in such a way that you could see yourself in the previous mirror. Since both mirrors were facing each other, this resulted in an apparent endless reflection of yourself again and again and again, until you were an infinite speck in the distance.
As I was thinking about that repeating image, the memory of a saying, “A rose is a rose is a rose”, sprang to mind. I don’t know why, I guess my internal GPU/ChatGPT flagged the repeating image and took that prompt as repeating prose. To me, a “rose is a rose” is a lazy attempt at prose, (Ha)! Sorry Gertrude (don’t mean to be rude). However the I put the repeating reflection idea with the rose and thought of how the rose has been a symbol of life and love for actual milinea. The Greeks garlanded Aphordites with roses, the Romans had a festival every May called Rosatio, they even used roses in their cusines, (and I thought rose water was something new). In the middle ages red roses were associated with the blood of Christ, and by extension, martyers. Even in the ‘modern age’ artists like Salvador Dali painted roses, he placed a couple underneath a giant rose:
Love, life, hope, endures through the ages and so that is what I tried to do here, the rose repeats itself and recedes into the distance a symbol of eternal hope, life, love:
https://www.artandobject.com/slideshows/rose-symbolism-throughout-art-history