Hidden Emotions

For my A level photography project, I decided to explore how when you hide certain facial feature, people find it a lot harder to read the person's emotions. Someone could be talking in a really happy tone but their expression looks sad. I explored how difficult it is to tell someone's feelings when you can only see their eyes and it lead me to start thinking about how this can represent a person's mental health. They could be smiling on the outside when internally they are hurting. I conducted research in to how colours are used to resemble emotions and created different coloured images whose colours contradicted the person's facial expressions. It then lead me to create collages and a magazine about mental health that these images would be a part of.

After creating these collages where all the colours represented different emotions and how you can experience more than one at once. I experimented more with colour and decided to just use one colour that then contradicted the expression shown.

In this one I chose bright positive colours that people relate with happy, calming emotions but the expressions shown in each portrait suggest they are actually feeling rather miserable or annoyed all the negative emotions. In the next collage I did the opposite. I used darker colours to symbolise feelings like sadness and anger but they appear happy.