Images from my senior thesis in handmade photography. The purpose of these photographs began as a means to express music through photography, and quickly evolved to a question of reality - what is real, and how do we relate to the world around us?  To do so I de-familiarize the viewer from the subject so that we see something that is real in an unreal way, accentuating the vulnerability that comes with challenging and understanding the "self." According to Slavoj Zizek, "we need the introduction of fiction to stage what we truly are." I also consider the medium itself - a photograph is usually thought to directly capture reality.  By challenging the photograph's relationship with reality, I hope to extend the same idea to our own relationship with reality. With this altered perception, perhaps we can find new understanding in our selves and the world around us.

"If you are aware of a state which you call is, or reality, or life, this implies another state called isn't, or illusion or unreality, or death - there it is; you can't have one without the other. And so to make life poignant, it always has to come to an end. That's exacty - don't you see? - what makes it lively.  Liveliness is change, is motion....So you can see you're always at the place where you always are, only it keeps appearing to change." - Alan Watts *

*This excerpt was also sampled at the beginning of Strfkr's song Hungry Ghost, which had a presence in the shooting of this film and is where the title of this project comes from.