"Monsters" - The Making of "Depersonalization"

This image is from a body of work titled “Monsters don’t live under your bed, they live in your head.” It is a collection that aims to personify mental illness and extreme emotions. This particular image is a representation of depersonalization.

The goal of this image was to portray an out of body feeling. For people with depersonalization it often feels as if you’re watching your own life play out without any control. It is also often difficult to separate visions and emotions from reality. This is depicted in the image not only through the multiple faces, but also through the motion blur connecting them.

This was a difficult image to photograph because it was all about proper timing. The model had to kneel on the floor and turn her head very slowly, stopping for fractions of seconds at certain places to ensure a clear profile. It took fourteen shots to determine that three seconds was the proper amount of exposure time.

The image then had to go through some post processing however as the color image wasn’t as clean as initially hoped. A more defined profile and some detail in the center face were accentuated in Lightroom not only by converting to black and white but also by increasing the clarity of the image a fair amount.