Dissociative Personality Disorder (DID)
For my second photoshoot, I have chosen to visually explore dissociative personality disorder.
What is DID?
Dissociative Identity disorder is a mental illness that alters ones perception of reality, often with extreme symptoms such as memory loss, a sense that the world around them is unreal, and an uncertainty about who they really are, which often leaves sufferers of DID to develop multiple identities in order to deal with reality.
Most people affected by this disorder will have experienced a traumatic event during childhood, 'dissociating', or switching off from reality, in order to cope with their traumatic experiences.
The sense of being disconnected from yourself or from the world can be extremely distressing, significantly affecting work and personal life.
It can affect people at any age and is nothing to do with a head injury or underlying health condition, as it's a direct result of the brain adapting to a difficult early life.
Photoshoot 2: Marco Brambilla
In order to visualise DID, I have researched and have become heavily influenced by the artist Marco Brambilla, and more specifically, his 'Ghost' photoshoot.
The photo has influenced me to replicate this idea as a form of visualising Dissociative Identity disorder due to its use of morphing multiple faces of the same person together, which I thought helped visualise the many personalities within a sufferer of the disorder.
Marco Brambilla likely took the photograph within a light studio, to ensure there is a over exposure of white within his shot. Using a studio will also ensure that he has enough light capable enough to use a fast shutter speed, that would help give a crisp clear image and prevent blurring of his model. Because of an excessive amount of light available, Marco Brambilla would have likely used a faster shutter speed, taking a bunch of photos of the model, with her face being re-positioned in each shot and conveying different faces and emotions to achieve the photograph Marco desired. A further degree of editing would have also been made in order to attach the faces alongside one another, as well as minor tweaks such as increasing contrast and brightness.
What is DID?
Dissociative Identity disorder is a mental illness that alters ones perception of reality, often with extreme symptoms such as memory loss, a sense that the world around them is unreal, and an uncertainty about who they really are, which often leaves sufferers of DID to develop multiple identities in order to deal with reality.
Most people affected by this disorder will have experienced a traumatic event during childhood, 'dissociating', or switching off from reality, in order to cope with their traumatic experiences.
The sense of being disconnected from yourself or from the world can be extremely distressing, significantly affecting work and personal life.
It can affect people at any age and is nothing to do with a head injury or underlying health condition, as it's a direct result of the brain adapting to a difficult early life.
Photoshoot 2: Marco Brambilla
In order to visualise DID, I have researched and have become heavily influenced by the artist Marco Brambilla, and more specifically, his 'Ghost' photoshoot.
The photo has influenced me to replicate this idea as a form of visualising Dissociative Identity disorder due to its use of morphing multiple faces of the same person together, which I thought helped visualise the many personalities within a sufferer of the disorder.
Marco Brambilla likely took the photograph within a light studio, to ensure there is a over exposure of white within his shot. Using a studio will also ensure that he has enough light capable enough to use a fast shutter speed, that would help give a crisp clear image and prevent blurring of his model. Because of an excessive amount of light available, Marco Brambilla would have likely used a faster shutter speed, taking a bunch of photos of the model, with her face being re-positioned in each shot and conveying different faces and emotions to achieve the photograph Marco desired. A further degree of editing would have also been made in order to attach the faces alongside one another, as well as minor tweaks such as increasing contrast and brightness.
Contact Sheets
My Edits
These are my edits that I had created from the few photographs I had gathered as part of my Marco Brambilla photoshoot. Within this shoot, I particularly focussed on the photographers use of a whitewashed background, and the merging of the models face to create a head that contained multiple faces that showed pain and distress. However I decided to further accentuate those emotions to show a spectrum of different emotions that a sufferer may be feeling as their personalities switch to that of another, as each emotion represents a strong emotion one of the personalities the sufferers may frequently feel. I also aimed to have the neutral emotions at the centre of the face, as that would be the default or 'original' personality, and having the other more eccentric emotions merge off that of a centralised one. I accomplished these edits by taking various angles of the model within the photography studio and using the rooms sharp concentrated lighting to ensure there would be no shadows/dark areas, as I intended for each face to seamlessly blend into one another via photoshop, as well as the whitewashed background. Due to the rooms lights that allowed for concentrated amounts of light to wherever I required them, thus a longer timed shutter speed and wide aperture was not needed.