wish we could turn back time, to the good old days.

when our mama sang us to sleep, but now we’re stressed out.

Everyone feels stress. There’s good stress, and there’s bad stress. We all have those days. Everything feels like too much. There’s just so much going on.

Am I good enough?

I hate feeling like this.

Why do I deserve to feel like this?

Everyone, just stop making me feel like this.

It’s not fair

It’s not fair

It’s not fair

It’s not

fair.

People don’t change.

People won’t change just because you want them to.

They will constantly put pressure on you.

Maybe it’s just on you to get past that.

So you do.

You learn to feel peace.

You learn to let go.

That’s what you needed:

To let go.

Find your happiness not in other people

Not in the other people who made you stressed

angry

feel hate.

Feel that way,

But find your happiness

Within yourself.

It’s hard.

I know it is.

But

Just

Try.

In these photographs, I tried to capture my dad feeling stressed, and it kind of imitates the cliché vision of stress. As in the stress that people expect others to feel because everyone does. In portraiture, capturing faces and hands has been a significant aspect of the art that I have tried to shoot. Specifically for my photos, I have used lighting from low angles to create and cast dramatic shadows behind my subject, with the coloured lighting almost highlighting the silhouette of the shadows. This creates the image that there is always someone watching you even when you are stressed, and that underlying feeling creates the human desire to be liked in society and just be the perfection you imagine. The red in the images helps to add to that stressed mood, but as you think deeper into what one may feel towards societal pressures, you may see the anger that I was trying to portray. In my set, I have also layered the blue lighting into the shot, creating this almost half anger with overshadowing peace as the gesticulations that my dad uses become wider, and act like a release of stress as he begins to smile in the photos. The movement in the last few images with the blue light renews that sense of letting go and freedom in oneself to feel happy and good without the sharp black shadows hiding behind one’s choices, like pressure from society.