JPG Magazine: Stories: Photo Essay: I Know You.

I Know You.

By Jeremiah Bailey

16 October 2008

One of my favorite writes once said, "A costume can be quite comfortable. It can make you feel more beautiful. It can even make you look like someone else...but it's still you." This quote from Mr. Oberst was an afterthought, but it turns out that this is exactly what I was exploring.

When I first started to get into photography I was much more interested in objects than I was in people. This probably spawned from the fact that people, in general, terrify me. I'm a shy, quite kind of person. I've never been much for conversing, especially not with strangers, so the thought of having a model that's expecting me to give direction was just too daunting to imagine. As years passed I grew up a little, I got a little less scared, and I got much more interested in people as subjects. Now they are pretty much what I prefer to shoot. This project was one of my first one's in which I worked with people that were not just friends whom I was comfortable around, like in the past, but some were mere acquaintances. The mustache didn't start out as what it eventually turned into. I was inspired by a Polaroid series a fellow student did of women with fake mustaches on. I loved this idea and I love comedy in my work. I wanted to take people, throw in a ridicules mustache, and put them into scenes that made statements about the kind of people I've known them to be.

As I began to work with the models I found that the stache made working with them so much easier. This simple piece of acrylic fiber and double-sided tape became an amazing tool that let both the models and I feel so much more relaxed. As I thought about this it reminded me of the way some people try to explain away hypnotism. It's the idea that if someone has an "excuse" to act a certain way, or in this case to not take themselves too seriously or maybe even feel as if they are someone different all together, then they will take advantage of the situation, and that is exactly what happened with my project. I think that these images say a lot about the people included in them, and I feel that they were able to relax and let their real personalities come through as they worked with me just because they felt a little less inhibited due to that glorious mustache on their upper lip that had just come out of its plastic and cardboard packaging.