The creation of this zine was inspired by an exploration of the self. I first drew a mind map to analyse the exploration of self, and then I chose myopic eyes as the starting point. I have been nearsighted since primary school, but I hate wearing glasses because I find them uncomfortable and they make me ugly. But my parents and teachers suggested wearing glasses, but I didn’t like it so I only wore them in class. So the world I see when I go out is blurred, so I wanted to make a zine with the theme of the blurred world in my eyes, to show the world as I see it, and I thought it would be good to give up wearing glasses to see the world in a blur.
As I want to study styling and production at Ba, I will be showing more styling in this zine.
Because I wanted to show how I felt at night when I couldn’t see the street because of my nearsightedness, I chose clothes made of two pieces or beads because they would look the way I wanted them to look with the flash.
The first look was shot in an unlit area at night because I wanted to show the effect I wanted, and I used flash off lights, because the environment was too dark to show the effect I wanted, so I chose to add fill lights and reflectors.After that I wanted to get some vertigo, so I put a colour film in front of the lens and panned it in front of the lens and used the flash, but it was a bit random so I had to take a lot of shots to get the right one.
Through this project I wanted to express my idea that people who have trouble seeing with nearsightedness should not be anxious and worried about it and accept that it might not be so bad and that it is a very special and beautiful visual experience.
Carlyn gave me some advice when shooting – to use glasses to shoot through and to achieve some different and interesting effects. And because I chose styling and production I needed to think about the whole look, my first look didn’t take into account the shoes so I did a full body look book for looks 2 and 3.
I think the advantage for me is that I did a planning before the shoot —- what kind of pose and the overall atmosphere is like and what kind of place I want to shoot in, and communicate with the photographer in advance what kind of feeling I want and the theme of the zine. I also made some of the clothes that I wanted to use and I made some props to match them.
My downfall was that I didn’t have enough props and I need to have enough props for future projects to give a better look and ideally have some backups in case I need them. The costumes could also be more exaggerated.