My third try with this idea. In my first try, eager to create, I tried different apps to add a ‘spotlight’ effect to help blend images together, but had no luck. Then I remembered I have an actual image of a spotlight and playfully incorporated it. Reflecting on that first image, I wrote:
It falls short of reality, without apology. It’s honest about its artificiality. Not trying to deceive. Transparent in being a mix of real and not real. Surreal.
For the past week or so, I’ve been reflecting on those words and the curious way playful exploring can sometimes evoke questions for me. In this case, specifically, in what ways am I not being as honest as I’d like to be?
Images Used
The word surrealism also stayed with me. It applies in both how the image was made and the end result. The portrait, mural spotlight, and foggy road do not form a literal place, they create an uncanny, emotionally legible scene able to hold different meanings. The final image emphasizes an inner reality and the unconscious over the familiar everyday world.
What makes this style effective for emotional exploration or processing?
It disrupts your brain’s predictive patterns, moving you out of autopilot and into a struggle to make sense of the unexpected. Your brain needs to create new pathways and does so by looking for non-obvious connections. This interal experience is contained in something external that can be viewed, considered, and revisited at a tolerable distance.
Using the Image
The ambiguity, being visually unresolved, reveals your own associations, your own non-obvious connections. The individual details- the enclosing darkness, the spotlight, the hand position, the facial expression, the fog, the vanishing road, the clarity or impression of each detail are ingredients to form associations. They can carry overlapping or contradictory feelings like being exposed and hidden, stalled and moving, alone and observed.
You can ask, what does the part of me that responds most strongly to this image need at this moment?
