Objects forming an Identity

Developing on from my mark making I wanted to explore objects that could form an identity, the idea that people buy possessions due to what other people want to see them as or what they aspire to be. Candy Jernigan explores objects creating identity or leaving evidence of an identity as she collected objects throughout her life and stored them in a journal catalogued as her existence. 

Candy Jernigan Evidence 

I wanted to further this idea by asking people what objects they feel could represent them. Another quality that I like about Jernigan is how she presents her work in a publication format; on every page she considers the layout of each item and how it sits. This is something I am very interested in as last year I found myself presenting my work in a publication format. I started by using less tangible objects to create an identity. An image that stood out to me was a pavement with a cigarette underneath a bottle cap, this image looked to me like two columns in a layout format. 

This image immediately made me think of a businessman on his cigarette break, I saw the two slabs as a suit jacket with the cigarette and cap reflecting a tie, also the parallel that many men who work in business have stressful lives and can often be found having a cigarette on the pavement outside their work. I did this with other photographs I have taken such as 'The Construction Worker' that consists of three footprints engraved into the pavement. This took my mind to construction workers because they have left their mark on the urban landscape in buildings, roads and pavements and so these footprints become their initials/signature.

I move this on to looking at people I knew and giving them objects that could mirror their identity. My most effective images were 'coffee face' and 'camera face', both of which were developed in Photoshop and both were created by layering the object over the top of the face and manipulating the transparency.

This gave the effect that you see certain aspects of the object and certain features of the face making them appear as one. I also wanted to support this with a brief amount of text similar to how Sophie Calle does in her 'appointments' book. She has an object and then a small narrative to support it and to describe a certain person that has impacted her life. These images worked well individually however I wanted to bring all these different elements into a publication to illustrate my progression in the theme of identity, and also to trigger my brain into thinking about the layout of said publication. For research I went to Magma and looked at a variety of publications to see how they have laid out their images and text for me to find my own unique identity on the page.