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You've really got me on a tear here. Another important aspect of my interest in UV is the very manner by which people find it upsetting or unsettling. Speaking frankly, shooting only just below the visible range, things aren't /that/ radically different from normal BW photography. I would say that I'm not really adding much. However, I treasure this distinction between the mundane people are familiar with, and mundane things re-contextualized or lightly altered in way that puts people on edge. In some cases, this could be finding the sinister in the banal, like with David Lynch's work. The example I always use is the motel in Blue Velvet. There's nothing unusual or irregular about the location, relative to that which many people will have already seen, traveling as a kid in the 90s or early 00s. Buildings like that can be found all around, with the same staid decor in place today. The way Lynch portrays it makes it look appropriately grim and macabre. Cindy Sherman plays with this idea as well, although in a more subtle direction that hovers around mild disgust or uncomfortable novelty. By adorning herself in heavy makeup, staging scenes we'd recognise from dramas on the silver screen, she cultivates a dissociative dreaminess. It's alienation in the mundane, grotesqueness of the banal. I would like to think I'm doing the same. I reconstitute all the things that are already there, cut out the light we can see, and suddenly people don't recognise themselves. The conventionally attractive women I've shot still, in my opinion, look identical; still pretty. The cues that surround them in the shot are different, though. Shadows are heavy, highlights strong, skin dull and grey. I'm playing with the dials to turn the most boring and plain portraits into something that puts people off just a little, like the uneasiness of standing for a long period on a 3% grade. It's enough to be detected, to unsettle, and hard to identify, quantify. I'm obsessed with this idea.
