Project Proposal (synopsis)

Through my project I want to use photography as a tool to show the duality of our reality. By using Buddhist Four Noble truths, I want to capture what lies underneath our everyday experiences that holds us back from and leads us to the “path to the enlightenment”. I want to experiment with how you can use photography (and possibly editing) to portray the invisible, the unconscious that’s hidden beneath the appearance of everyday. In my research for the project I will be looking at Ben Highmore’s “Questioning the everyday”, Rudolf Otto’s concept of Numinous and the Freud’s and Marx’s concepts of the unconscious. For Freud and Marx, the everyday is both real and unreal, both actuality and the disguise of actuality, the everyday is not as it appears. Or rather “behind or alongside or underneath the appearance of everyday life lies another actuality.”