In my photo set, I want to capture and portray the feeling of looming dread that comes from procrastinating on something important. As a person who procrastinates way too much, I know what it feels like: you know that you need to get this thing done as soon as possible, and yet you keep avoiding it – consciously or not – and the clock ticks on in the background. Part of your brain tells you that you should probably stop scrolling and focus for once. You ignore it and keep scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling.

All the while, time slips away.

It’s dark outside. In the blink of an eye, hours have gone by. You never even noticed.

You want to get to work now. You have to, there are only a couple of hours left before the deadline.

But your hand moves as if of its own volition, and you can only watch as the clock ticks down while you waste away in front of your screen.

 

That may be a bit of an overdramatic retelling, but I want to take that feeling of wasting time, of frustration, of wanting to stop but also unthinkingly plowing on ahead despite knowing better. And what better way to convey that in a photo than some good old eldritch horror?

There are many different flavors of the eldritchy-horroresque aesthetic, but I think that one flavor that would work well in particular would be the one related to puppeteers and masks and strings. I want to use the puppet and mask imagery to convey the idea of losing control, especially losing control over yourself and your own actions. The potential designs of the mask (masks, plural, depending on which specific direction I choose to go into) could also help convey the many different emotions that come from the process of extreme procrastination, and take these emotions to the extreme so that they resonate more with the audience. I also want to try and include some clock motifs (and smoke if possible, both to represent the murky foggy feeling in your brain when you’re in that state of procrastination and to connect to the idea of burnout, which is both a common reason and result for such procrastination) to add further layers of symbolism and to connect the photos to the theme of procrastination.

Another thing I want to experiment with is the lighting and background, as they are very important to the atmosphere of portraits. Two different types of lighting that I may use are dim, muted lights to portray the foggy feeling and the blankness in your brain, and also bright, bold lights for the frustration that you feel as the deadline creeps closer and closer. I think that when these different types of lighting are put next to each other in a photo set, the juxtaposition and the contrast between these photos will enhance each other and make them more poignant. It could also help show the pattern of procrastination, where every once in a while you have these moments of clarity where you realize just how much time has passed – you feel frustrated at yourself, because now you’re stressed and you don’t have enough time to do anything – but then you somehow fall back into the cycle. In the end, you’re only more frustrated that you somehow managed to waste even more time.