First year, Eden Watterson discusses her creative interpretation of Gothic horror for The Personal Portfolio Module.
7th June 2021
During this project, I felt that I found a style of photography that is interesting to me and makes me feel the most creative. I have always been a lover of horror films and art from an early age and decided that this module would be the perfect time to challenge myself to create images that I, and people like me who love horror, would find interesting and unusual.
When looking for inspiration for this project, I decided that I wanted to focus on Gothic horror and looked at Gothic novels for inspiration. This led me to look at The Grimm Brother’s Tales. I read nearly all 200+ short tales and chose 4 which I felt were strangest or intriguing; I picked The Three Snake Leaves, Cinderella, The Juniper Tree and Fitcher’s Bird.
I chose to focus on what I felt were the most important details in the tale to help tell the story and used portrait, location and still life photography to help this. Experimenting with these types of photography also helped to improve my skills in these areas and defined my area of specialisation for future projects. In this photographic series, I wanted to focus on the female characters in the tales, to create strong and unique portraits which make the women the centre of the stories and consequently produce a female empowerment message, although gruesome.
Before this project I had not experimented with text or graphic design in my work however, I felt that the use of text would be beneficial for bringing my images together. I think that by using text I made an interesting photographic interpretation of The Grimm Brother’s Tales and I really enjoyed working on it.
