"Binary Opposition" Photography Assignment 1

"Binary Opposition"

Photo Assignment 1

Considering the term 'binary opposition', and its patterns I became intrigued by the opposition of front+back. As human beings, we identify with each other through our faces; the front of our heads. In museums, busts face outwards with their backs toward the wall. We rarely spend time carefully considering how the back of a person's head looks. In my career as a hairstylist, I have had the unique opportunity to become familiar with the back of people's heads, something I assume the average person rarely does. In this diptych, I want to compel the viewer to consider the 'backward' physical aspects of the people around them (as I get to do behind the chair). These are images of myself, both from the front and the back. Ideally, in an exhibition, it would be a collection of diptychs of many many heads, forward and backward. I experimented with the pairings and cropping of the images, and in the end, I decided my favourite was the cropped-together black and white images (above), but I have included the rest below.