The idea came from a time of negative reflection of myself. Being the parent that has to get two young children ready and off to school and then to work myself, every morning is filled with me shouting, cajoling and general grumpiness. I couldn’t help but see myself as the one that is alway being negative towards the children (I love dearly). I decided to ask the children to do some drawings that reflected their thoughts and perceptions of me.
The result was surprising and uplifting! My five year old daughter is the artist of the house, so most, but not all of what you see comes from her. All of the pictures had smiley faces and rainbows, and my eight year old son wrote a great positive piece about me. I tried to break the positive thoughts and asked my daughter to illustrate when I tell them off. The pictures were so small that I had to use three different ones to fill a page.
After the children had done their bit, I then had to set up a series of self portraits to depict me as I saw myself. As there was only one negative drawing I used this as an overlay for a set-up that we did whereby I was telling them off and sending them to bed. Interestingly, all of the negative images that I took of myself felt like I was setting up a caricature of myself, whereas the happy ones felt very natural.
The overlay of the children’s drawings may be seen as surplus to the brief, however I think that the dichotomy that occurs in (most) of the negative images is absent in the positive images, which creates depth and poses questions beyond the ‘straight’ photography which it would otherwise appear to be.
I see! 