Confide In Me

“I stand in the distance,
I watch from afar.
Should I offer my assistance,
Should it matter who you are?

We all get hurt by love
And we all have our cross to bear,
But in the name of understanding now
Our problems should be shared.

Confide in me, confide in me.

And I can keep a secret
And throw away the key,
But sometimes, to release it
Is to set our children free.

We all get hurt by love
And we all have our cross to bear,
But in the name of understanding now
Our problems should be shared.

Confide in me, confide in me,
Confide in me, confide in me.

Stick or twist, the choice is yours.
Hit or miss, what’s mine is yours.
Stick or twist, the choice is yours.
Hit or miss, what’s mine is yours.

We all get hurt by love
And we all have our cross to bear,
But in the name of understanding now
Our problems should be shared.

Confide in me, confide in me,
Confide in me, confide in me.”

[ Confide In Me – Hurts ]

Once upon a time, I took a photo based on Hurts’ cover of Kylie Minogue’s Confide In Me, which… was okay, I guess? I mean, the light was nice, the model too, overall it kind of did work out as a photo… mostly. The truth is, for starters, the focus was not that sharp. And the core of the connection with the song, which goes through Kylie’s hotline-inspired music video, lied mostly in the little phonebook my model and I found at the location we were shooting in… which isn’t easily readable in the photo, so it kinda falls flat. My mixed feelings about this photo led me to downright scrap it at first, while I was cleaning up the Inspiration Hurts folder on deviantArt, but I’m still sort of fond of it, so I don’t know, I put it back into the companion pieces folder and left it at that. And suddenly, Confide In Me needed a new visual representation.

The new idea came up almost at random, while I was listening to the song a few weeks ago. I realised the lynchpin for a strong visual rendition of Confide In Me should be the “keep a secret and throw away the key” line, which I could easily convey through the necklace I always wear. A key in this context would be connected to secrets, especially secret-keeping, confidentiality, thus the trustworthiness the lyrics try to sell to the listener. Placing it over the mouth doubles both as a promise to keep it shout, and as the act of swallowing the key so the secret is safe forever. Also, I’m smiling (which I rarely do in photos) and directly engaging the viewer to further affirm a sense of familiarity and reliability.

The basic idea I wrote down quickly, but it took me a few weeks to take the photo because first I desperately needed a haircut, and then I caught a cold that just wouldn’t leave me alone, so I had to postpone it all until I felt (and looked) better. The reason why I modelled myself for this photo is partly quick availability, partly the fact that I would never lend my necklace to someone else, even if just for a quick shoot. It’s part of me, so it’s only fair that the whole me would be in the photo along with it. Posing was a bit of a challenge more in an abstract way than with the actual shoot, because I have this preconception that I either can’t emote in photos, or look silly, awkward or ugly when I try. I actually freaking love the way I look here and I’m very satisfied with the overall result, so once again, I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone and it was totally worth it.
Now let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope for a cloudy day, so I can take the next Inspiration Hurts photo.

Matter Of Time

“‘It’s a matter of time’, you said,
‘It’s a matter of time’.
‘Figure out what is yours’, I said,
‘Figure out what is mine’.
And even if I pretended trust,
It was not hard to pretend.
And even if I gave up myself,
You’re not on what I depend.

As you wanted me to be right,
I preferred to be wrong.
And as your self-pity got control,
You supposed to get strong.
You might misunderstand me, dear,
But I had all that before.
Get control of yourself, my friend,
But you’re about to ignore.

Don’t have to comprehend where I belong,
Where I pretend to know if you’re wrong.
You tried to reach me on behalf of your errors,
A life getting serious.
You’re not as delirious to look in the mirrors
Of open decisions, so run.
Behalf of your errors, a life getting serious,
So look for where you have begun.”

[ Matter Of Time – Leandra ]

Oh boy, this photo.

So, remember how in 2015 I was going through an utterly disastrous moment, I had to really, truly acknowledge that I was clinically depressed because, left untreated, it was pulling me down, I had dropped out of university for good, I had no idea whatsoever where my life was headed and, on top of it all, that included photography because I had had a certain experience that had totally shattered my self-confidence? Yeah, I don’t have fond memories of that time.

At some point, after I reached my absolute low due to a wrong anti-depressant prescription that turned me into a zombie for about a month and a half (don’t worry, I’ve changed my therapist immediately afterwards), things started to get to a point where at least I was functional enough to tell myself, “Boy, try to figure your shit out; to hell with past mistakes and future anxieties, just focus on the here an now, to find a way to feel better, get stronger and then deal with the rest”.

While most of my life was still up in the air, at least I got my creativity back, my most important way to sort out my feelings, deal with them and feel like I could turn something productive out of my misery. I reshot the photos that had opened that can of worms in the first place, and went on to take a few others for my Inspiration Hurts and Morphine projects because I was approaching a once-in-a-lifetime deadline: I was going to have my hair cut short.

I was tired of wearing it long and it was one of the weights I felt I needed to shed if I wanted to go on. I was struggling with my image, with the amount of care it required (and when you’re that depressed, even basic self-care is difficult) and I just kept it tied all the time because it was an annoyance. I considered the idea for months, then, when I was feeling like I was at a turning point, I decided to do it. It was, as they say, a matter of time.

You see what I did there.

I had the idea the morning I was set to have the haircut and decided to go for it: I envisioned the song as a conversation between zombie-me and enough-is-enough-me, and thought of rendering it with old, long-haired me sitting on the floor on his self-pity party in the shadow, and new, short-haired me standing up confident and facing the light: the change, symbolised by the haircut, was the titular matter of time. So I set the tripod, took the long-haired photos and left it all there for the next morning, with the same light, angle, perspective and everything, for the short-haired one. I also carefully studied the styling so I’d wear two similar outfits but with slight differences, to signal a progression in the narrative. Basically, everything worked in theory.

The problem is, I was in a hurry and the first batch of portraits was so-and-so: the best one fit the idea perfectly, but I miscalculated the frame and had part of my arm cut off. When I tried to assemble the photo, this made the whole composition horribly unbalanced and, hey, the problem was the portrait I couldn’t get another shot at, so what to do? I just left the PSD sitting unfinished on my external hard-drive, and tried (and failed) to come up with an entirely different concept for the song.

Then yesterday, while I was doing some cleaning up, I opened it again and damn, I still liked the idea after all this time. So I went through the other takes and ta-dah, I found one that wasn’t as good, but whose elbow I could transplant to move the whole composition so it wouldn’t look awkward. At this point, I only had to wait for morning today, re-shoot the background (which, at this point, had become a bloody mess), blend the whole damn thing together and hell yes, I did it, I saved the photo!

It has become a matter of a long time at this point, but I’m glad I pulled it off after all, it’s a good reminder that even when you lose all hope, you can still dig you way out of a bad moment and do something out of it.