Sister

ALL IMAGES IN BOOK ARE HERE: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rheapappas/sets/72157609030736727/

My current body of work has been evolving for a while. It was not until recently that I discovered the direction I wanted to go and would like to continue. In hindsight, the themes of my earlier work appear evident. When I think about photography that I have done for my education, I don’t think about individual projects, processes, and the distinguishing factors between periods of my life, but each project as an evolved form of the previous one. In my earlier work, it appeared that I jumped around considerably without digging deeper. This year I have learned how and why my work has evolved.

This semester, my current body of work was difficult, more difficult than I imagined it would be. I learned that if I don’t have to emotionally overcome something or feel the root of my work in my gut, my work doesn’t come out passionate, understandable, and ultimately successful. I worked every week in uncovering new ideas and revelations about my childhood. I uncovered things that, when I was in the moment, I could not see. But afterwards I was able to look back and explore all sides of the matter. I pushed this concept hard and created not only realistic images directly from my childhood diaries but also images that never actually occurred, deepening my work. The marriage of factual images with imaginative images gave me space to breathe, recollect, and then re-enter.
My older projects dealt with women at night, families with premature babies, acts of desperation, men kissing windows, adolescent relationships, growing up as a young man, gender issues with women high school softball players, and female sexuality. My current work deals with childhood, growing up, and traumas experienced. In my first few years of college, it was hard for me to see the ideas that I was interested in. I was criticized for being all over the board. Now when I look back, I see a cohesive sharing of my interests and subconscious themes.
My interest in subconscious themes comes from the one thing we can never fully experience, but make ourselves believe is obtainable – pleasure. Reading Freud, Foucault, and Erickson opened my eyes to intimacy and temptation. Exploring how we as humans deal with this explosion of sexual energy and hope of pleasure-full intimacy- is intriguing because of how instantaneous it is. Just as equally interesting as pleasure is its ultimate opposite, trauma. There is something pleasurable about trauma. We experience it in horror movies, as if it is more pleasurable when it stops and that’s what makes it “ride worth it”. I am very curious about these two charged principles. More than any other age group, youth is the most pure form of this energy since when you are young that is when it starts and manifests itself fully.
The themes in my work can be credited to the photographers that I mostly study and admire, namely, Sally Mann, Andrea Modica, Nan Goldin, Angela Strassheim, and Catherine Opie. The most influential and inspirational to me is Sally Mann, not necessarily because we focus on the same subjects, but because I focus on relationships and the disconnect between people, while she focuses on the strange, awkward, dreamlike childhood and where her subjects grow up. Unlike Sally Mann, but a lot like Angela Strassheim, I focus my work in modern suburbia. Though this is not central to my work, it is relevant to because this is where I grew up.
More than other photographers, I find inspiration in my past and my childhood. If my ideas were not actual events, I imagined them or thought a lot about them, so much that they became real to me. This theme continues today more frequently in my work--the need to express my biggest traumas: my loss of virginity and what that meant, a car accident that left me emotionally damaged, an abusive sister who needed just as much help as me, and dissatisfaction with the operations and agendas of institutions.
I was also very influenced by the movies and books of my day. Movies include Juno, Kramer vs. Kramer, Mona Lisa Smile, The Sculls, The Princess and the Warrior, Water, and Empire Records. Books include Anne Brashares, The Sister Hood of the Traveling Pants Collections, Alice Sebold Books, Crash, Transforming Trauma, Had Enough? Fighting Back by James Carville, She’s Come Undone, Beyond Basketball, Sex as a Second Language, The World without Us, and Childhood and Society by Eric Erickson. These movies and books have subconsciously influenced my work.
In my current project, Juno has been my ultimate emotional resource. Though, I do not take on the pacing and subject of the movie, I am intrigued by a young girl coming into her sexuality and having to grow up quickly. She is not only young and coming into her own, but she suddenly she a trauma that makes her question who she is and the very ground she walks on.
My current work has its roots in an older project, young women and sexuality. It evolved to suburbia, growing up in suburbia, abuse, and then eventually childhood--the story of growing up in suburbia with abuse and trauma and a combination of the underlying themes that I have been exploring instinctually.
In addition, my current work has been more narrative than my past work, due to the amount of personal and emotional work that I investigated during this project. Since this body of work focused on my childhood, not only did I have to re-live it, but I also had to emotionally dig into the past and the hard times I had and figure out what happened, why it hurt, what was my part, and how others reacted. I had to see my childhood from inside out and also from outside in, meaning how others felt in relationship to me.
I started reading my old diaries that I have been keeping since seventh grade. This gave me the images to photograph and how they fit together. This also caused me to become self-reflective, not only about my work, but also about my personal life. In my work, the abuser, the one who causes the trauma is my sister. My sister and I have been unhappy with each other most our life. When I plunged head first into this project, not only did I learn about my past, but I learned about my role in our unhappiness and how much my sister and I need each other today.
My whole family, including my sister, has become closer due to this project. As this began to happen, I was more inspired to continue and bring resolution to our past. I had been holding onto my past for so long, but now I can breathe and move past it. In its purest form, this project was therapeutic. It was, as Stevie Rexroth would say, me vomiting out these images just to get them out of me. Now that it’s done, I have future work, better work, and different work to look forward to. It was the first time I shot so much for one project and really dug deep, deeper than I have in a long time without shutting down when it got too tough. I have confidence now that I can do work to this depth, without being frightened of it.