“The Book of Sorrows”, based on “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”, is a three-part plate meant to be printed as a poster for one of my courses. The idea was to interpret the sorrows in a way that will create visual resonance to the viewer. Our only limitation was that we weren’t allowed to perform photo-manipulation on our photographs (but yes, we were allowed to do some retouching only) and we needed to have at least one unifying factor to create a sense of consistency all throughout the series.
For the plate, I decided to interpret the sorrows as confessions of different characters undergoing these sorrows, hence the use of a customized type for the “obscure sorrow” using a brush pen. The paragraphs under the one-sentence header are like diary entries of these characters, expressing their sorrows in line with the definition from the dictionary as if to tell their story of their suffering with that particular sorrow. The use of black cloth and the fact that these characters are entangled by this cloth symbolizes their entanglement in their own sorrows.
Check out the website here: http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/
mahpiohanzia
n. the disappointment of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the ballast of your own weight and ignited the fuel tank of unfulfilled desires you’ve been storing up since before you were born.
gnossienne
n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.
catoptric tristesse
n. the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we’re coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.
n. the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we’re coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.
