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Description
"and she never saw the king to tell him the sky is falling."

reverse order of my final productions project H1N1 bye bye birdie

model: the awesome Jen
camera: Canon 20D

001 [link]
002 [link]
004 [link]
005 [link]
006 [link]
007 [link]
008 [link]
009 [link]
010 [link]
012 [link]
013 [link]
014 [link]

statement:

I was raised in an atmosphere of apocalyptic paranoia. Not the judgment day sort with the fire and brimstone, but the kind with meteors, alien conspiracies, atomic war, pandemics and Y2K. A religion of science and science fiction.
Some families dreamt of small cabins by the lake, mine planned for bunkers under the house.
And when it wasn’t the bomb, it was the bug.
At first it was “wash your hands” then it was “don’t wash your hands, anti-bacterial soap creates resistant viruses”. At the age of eight I might have started a small scale panic after telling my friends at school about the dangers of the flesh-eating bacteria. I was convinced I had ebola, clearly evidenced by a sore throat and a rash, and soon everyone was crying and demanding throat lozenges.

I grew out of the obsession soon after, but my mother just became more firm in her conviction. By the time Y2K became a threat she was no longer content to speculate without action, we were ordered to buy as many canned goods as possible, a portable gas stove, hundreds of bottles of water and a tent… when she began thinking about buying a shotgun for the day when the neighbors figured out we had a stash, we were done with humoring her.
My upbringing has certainly had an impact, on one level I completely reject my doomsday training, but still often have nightmares of the end of the world. Floods, disease, the odd zombie, but mostly of birds; and in every dream there are thousands of them falling from the sky. It was in response to this that I decided to photograph the series “H1N1 | bye bye birdie”.

The Avian Flu, a variant of which was responsible for the Spanish Flu of 1918, is at the core of the concept. In illustrating this idea I drew on the structure of fable to tell a story of young woman struck by the virus. I shot it in a cold, cinematic style that accords with the underlying tones of traditional, pre-disneyfied fairytales and songs that were often very dark, terrifying stories, some of which touched on subjects such as the Black Death. The basis of the series is the re-imagining of the story of Chicken Little in an ominous, modernized version, examining the obvious analogy to birds heralding the end of the world and its impact on the individual.

Description
"and she never saw the king to tell him the sky is falling."

reverse order of my final productions project H1N1 bye bye birdie

model: the awesome Jen
camera: Canon 20D

001 [link]
002 [link]
004 [link]
005 [link]
006 [link]
007 [link]
008 [link]
009 [link]
010 [link]
012 [link]
013 [link]
014 [link]

statement:

I was raised in an atmosphere of apocalyptic paranoia. Not the judgment day sort with the fire and brimstone, but the kind with meteors, alien conspiracies, atomic war, pandemics and Y2K. A religion of science and science fiction.
Some families dreamt of small cabins by the lake, mine planned for bunkers under the house.
And when it wasn’t the bomb, it was the bug.
At first it was “wash your hands” then it was “don’t wash your hands, anti-bacterial soap creates resistant viruses”. At the age of eight I might have started a small scale panic after telling my friends at school about the dangers of the flesh-eating bacteria. I was convinced I had ebola, clearly evidenced by a sore throat and a rash, and soon everyone was crying and demanding throat lozenges.

I grew out of the obsession soon after, but my mother just became more firm in her conviction. By the time Y2K became a threat she was no longer content to speculate without action, we were ordered to buy as many canned goods as possible, a portable gas stove, hundreds of bottles of water and a tent… when she began thinking about buying a shotgun for the day when the neighbors figured out we had a stash, we were done with humoring her.
My upbringing has certainly had an impact, on one level I completely reject my doomsday training, but still often have nightmares of the end of the world. Floods, disease, the odd zombie, but mostly of birds; and in every dream there are thousands of them falling from the sky. It was in response to this that I decided to photograph the series “H1N1 | bye bye birdie”.

The Avian Flu, a variant of which was responsible for the Spanish Flu of 1918, is at the core of the concept. In illustrating this idea I drew on the structure of fable to tell a story of young woman struck by the virus. I shot it in a cold, cinematic style that accords with the underlying tones of traditional, pre-disneyfied fairytales and songs that were often very dark, terrifying stories, some of which touched on subjects such as the Black Death. The basis of the series is the re-imagining of the story of Chicken Little in an ominous, modernized version, examining the obvious analogy to birds heralding the end of the world and its impact on the individual.