Visual Narrative: Demon Spirit haunting (Essay)

Visual Narrative: Demon Spirit Haunting

             My visual narrative project tells a story my vacation to Java and my subsequent haunting by Balinese demon spirits.  The first two photographs in the gallery illustrate a paranoid feeling of being watched.  The second pair shows my horror at being tapped on the shoulder by a skeletal arm and the realization that I am not alone in my hotel.  The rest of the pictures in the gallery are the disembodied faces of the Balinese demon spirits who visit me in hellish waking dreams.

            The images of the masks are in some ways modeled after screen shots from a film called Mystics in Bali.  I saw the film a few years ago and despite the fact that it was really bad, in terms of production, acting, and, script, I saw a few images of floating masks that I really liked.  The images of these masks flying though the air attacking people were a little silly, but the masks themselves were memorable and seemed to possess a malevolent will of their own.

            The evil spirits that seem reside in many of these types of masks were what I was trying to capture.  I had some trouble setting the shots up because I was working alone and had to literally balance several things at once.  I had to do a lot of experimentation with the angles of the camera and multi-colored directional lights.  My hope, in setting the masks against a mirror, was to give them the appearance of floating in space.  In some of the photos, I feel like I was successful.  I think the monkey mask pictures look the best, which is why I have included so many of them in the gallery.  I took pictures of another mask, but they didn’t turn out as well, so I excluded them.  I am especially happy with the images that include myself.  This is for two reasons, I think that the inclusion of a living face adds story to the photograph and secondly, I’m simply proud of the fact that I lined them up correctly without being able to see the viewer.

            Overall, the feeling evoked by my project is meant to be that of fear, and to a lesser degree, intrigue.  I hope that my images are visually interesting regardless of narrative context.