swimsuit models needed
I'm actually serious. Sort of...
For all of you Toronto people, I'm looking for as many volunteers as possible for a photo shoot at the Etobicoke Olympium on Sunday the 18th at 7 pm. It's for my Representation and Difficult Knowledge class' final project. I've decided to revisit the site of a personal trauma and re-stage it.
Back in Grade 7 I was taking my bronze medallion class there. It was 3 hours, from 6-9 every Monday evening, for a few months. The first half of the class was in some musty classroom of sorts and the second half was in the water. One time we were doing some fairly routine exercises in the Olympic pool. We would take turns being the victim with various symptoms, and other people would try to figure out what was wrong with them. Someone might be having a heart attack in the water and be unconscious by the time the rescuer comes to get them. So it was my turn to be the victim. I forget what kind of ailment I had been assigned to perform, but my rescuer eventually brought me up by the side of the pool. And after he had had finished "resuscitating" me, he looked at me and said "hey, you don't have a fold in your eyelids. See, look at mine..." and he went on for a while touching his own eyes. I looked around uncomfortably, not knowing how to respond to a racialized statement like that. I don't remember what he looked like or what his name was, but that actually ends up working for me.
And that's what this photograph is about. I'm looking for people to take the place of the class and to recreate the scene. Except I'd like to reference French Romantic painters such as Delacroix and Géricault, as well as the work of the photographer Bernard Pierre Wolff. So it will be a more of an exaggerated and posed version of the truth, but hopefully it addresses the importance of this moment to me and adds a touch of surrealism to it. I'll be using my Holga, since the blurred edge vignetting will work as a reference to a memory. I think I need at least 5 people for this to work, as well as someone to physically take the picture, since I'll be in it.
Anyone? Please?