This image was inspired by an image shot by Alfred Eisenstaedt of a woman in a mental institute in 1937 (see below). His is better of course. His whole series is a fascinating but of photography.
The article I read said that his photos helped shape perception of mental health as the people in the pictures looked “terribly normal”.
He was quoted as saying, “they (the patients) don’t take me too seriously with my little camera.
“I don’t come as a photographer. I come as a friend.”
There’s a story right there.
In playing the character I thought a lot about what she might be carrying – what I would choose to carry in that place and why. Practically speaking moving back and forth from posing to the camera and back with my bundle of stuff it became clear to me that it was quite inconvenient having your hands full like that. I was constantly dropping stuff and reassembling my package. And it required more stuff to hold then I thought from first looking at the photograph. I concluded she probably remained still a lot of the time. That you are limited by your baggage can be taken both literally and figuratively.
Edit – Feb 2026.
I am revisiting this image. It doesn’t sit right with me, something is wrong with the scale and angles of it. And yet, I still has this bizarre experience of an unlocked memory, even though I did this. In terms of the final build, well, the miniature set was only just barely assembled and shot in peices and stitched together with photoshop. The single 3d printed was duplicated in photoshop, I spent a long time on getting the floor to blend right the lighting to look right. I can’t recall if I made another heater thing (what’s it called?) or used what I had from before.
BUt the thing I got most particular about was the floor and the depth in which the windows are set. I was, as I think I might have written about in my floor moulding post – and ironically, you can’t see it. BUt it’s a strange flashback to a place where I took an art class on Saturdays. I was going for that memory at the time of the build. It’s just particularly weird to have got something about that right and have it feel like an unlocked memory. I couldn’t have been older than 9 at the time. I don’t even know why my parents would have even signed me up for such a thing. My father was literally a professional artist. Just weird.
There is no relation to my experience there to the subject matter of this film, except to say there must have been something about that school that felt particularly cold and institutional. I don’t remember anything about the class at all. But the school. The school I did. The light, the sound, the smell, and the floors of course.