Reclaiming the Cherry

Abstract

When first embarking on the journey that is my senior project, I always looked at it as one singular idea surrounding my utter lack of experience with people, be it romantically or sexually. It felt as though using photography to create these images was my only way to work through the deep shame I felt from self-stigma, a way to start to understand and accept a “secret” I lived with. I longed to capture images similar to those in Nan Goldin’s, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Her work always struck me as raw and completely honest. Her photograph, Dieter on the Bed,was the ideal image I wanted to create. Quickly realizing that my anxiety played a huge part in the fact that my work never looked like this, I found myself sticking to photographing the things that were safe and never really venturing into the side of myself I needed to reach in order to create a connection between my project and what I truly felt.