My choice of subject came after a bit of a struggle. At first I was only concerned with the body language and movement of someone experiencing anxiety, but I couldn’t get enough variation or the focus I wanted to. I settled on four different pictures, each with a sense of narrative. An active frame is important in almost all of them. In the pregnancy scare photo the frame obscures both figures, the body of the man seeming to react in frustration at the tension of the moment and the female whose face is obscured by the frame leading the viewer to imagine her reaction. In the stove photo, we see a lit stove with a spatula and rag still on the red hot burner and just a slip of a person in the background turning away holding a pan, having forgotten about the burner now that his food is done.

Implied line is also important in  a few of these.  In the balding anxiety picture we are looking over the shoulder of the figure. Our eyes go first the his face goes to his and we follow his gaze into the mirror and see he is looking at his brow line. Similarly, his hand obscures something in the reflection, but when we look outside of the reflection to his hand we see a tuft of hair linking his gaze and reaction. In the cart photo one gazes across the composition and due to the blur and angle of the cart it becomes apparent it’s racing towards the right half of the composition which is ended by a red car, sitting unmovable and owner unaware of what is a about to happen. Like the stove picture, anxiety is evoked by this secret knowledge and an impulse to stop the collision which can’t be realized by the viewer.

I used color differently in each of the pictures but to similar effect. In the cart car photo I upped the contrast and intensified the reds throughout the photo, the effect of this to give everything a very crisp, solid feel similar to car adds and to contrast that with the blurred speeding cart and the idea that the car’s about to get dented. For the pregnancy scare photo I messed with the white balance to give the picture a thick yellow which stands in for the heavy anticipation and wait for what the pregnancy test will say. In the stove picture I allowed the glow of the forgotten stove to be the only light source, creating an ominous reddish glow. That reddish glow appears on the dish towel predicting the spread of the fire and even lights the figure’s hand creating the anticipation that each will be burned and imbuing the viewer with a sense of anxiety, the thing that they find most salient ignored by the figure off-screen with the pan. With the balding anxiety photo I made sure there was some yellow in the background (shower curtain) to reference that yellow I used in the pregnancy test photo, but my main change was adding a rosier hue to the figure looking into the mirror. This sort of blush goes with his anxiety manifesting and complicates his puzzled face. Overall, there is a red/yellow, repetition though both colors are used in different hues, that links the body of work together. .