For my chosen theme for my final major project, I chose the word “Broken” to describe the themes of the emotions and real life elements that go on through the struggles of my everyday life that most can relate to from overwork. I made the colour scheme black and white as some of these photos were taken at night and some with natural lighting, so that it might not only match better as a set but also express the weight of the sadness that is portrayed in each photo, I used self portraits to capture the moments I was at my most fragile state, allowing the natural lighting to do the work, and moments where I found my partner looking very tired and overwhelmed from working too much as well.
It wasn’t easy to compile these photos as I wanted raw emotions to be captured to display the stress and anxiety that affected not just our health but our minds as well. Finding the right objects to represent these was very tough as well, especially the toy robot as it’s not sold in many places, but I managed to find one that was a clock and the theme just wrapped itself around this object with “time” and “machines” as its elements.
The reason for the use of this object was to convey the message of “even machines have limits”, that we’re expected to work prolonged hours like machines, but if a machine is not taken care of or maintained well it can shut down, I used the robot as an expression of myself feeling like a machine on shut down with time constantly on my mind.
The way I edited these photos was by selecting the ones I liked best, then going through the film roll on Photoshop, and editing them with black and white filters, adjusting the shadows and light, then lastly saving them into my desktop in a folder and exporting it as a JPEG file.