Conor Galloway

D.O.B: 09/11/1991

UCAS Personal ID: 1071892662

Applying for: BA (Hons) Photography

Currently enroled at: UCA Rochester

Studying: BTEC Foundation Diploma in Art & Design

Email: ISConorG@aol.com

500 Word Piece for BA (Hons) Photography application to the University of Portsmouth (year 2011/2012).

The ‘Self-Destruction Series’

(also displayed underneath the first image of the series titled Self-Destruction (1) ).

I believe that the human race is approaching a point of no return, since the dawn of our time we have corrupted, killed and exploited based on our innate biological urges to selfishly fulfill our own needs, something we are now imposing on our environment. With my series of powerful photographs on ‘Self-Destruction’ my aim was to visualise the innate negative characteristics of the human race through symbolic imagery, how as a race we do have characteristics that can lead to our own, and others’ destruction. Inspiration from the Viennese Actionists in the mid to late 20th century plays a prominent role in my photography, these new artists emerged from the death and destruction that plagued the world during World War Two, highlighting the broken, vulnerable image of man that the world had become accustomed to through extreme performance art, acting out against the restraints and rules imposed by traditional art to create violent action avant-garde art. With inspiration also from the likes of Nick Knight and Annie Leibovitz, who have managed to create alternative art in the name of fashion, my aim was to combine the two completely different areas of art to produce a series of unique elaborately staged photoshoots that demonstrate how the selfishness and carelessness imposed on others will eventually lead to our downfall.

From a modern reenactment of the crucifixion, to a corpse laying waste in the rubbish of a residential street, this conceptual series was my first substantial piece of art and experimentation with the camera. Not wanting to show boring cliché examples of extreme methods of Self-Destruction, such as murder and substance abuse, I decided to explore powerful religious themes of corruption and betrayal, as shown in the first image two images, before moving on to explore other methods of destruction that are imposed on others in the last two images, creating a sense of empathy towards the individuals in the images. The ‘bin shoot’, the last image in the series, demonstrates my feeling against commercialism, ‘waste culture’, poverty gap and over-production, how it seems we take everything for granted, and how it will eventually lead to our downfall. I was inspired deeply by fine art, but even more so I was inspired by fashion photography, and it was at this point in my life I fell in love with it. I consider fashion art, and fashion photography only reinforces this for me. With my work I love to be loud, risky and ambitious, I like to tell stories, to create alternative realities, and exploring self-destruction with a fashion/editorial photography twist gave me the opportunity to do so.

With each piece of work I produce, I evaluate it, discussing what I like about it, what I don’t and how I can improve it as well as how to develop it further. I love this series, not just because it was my first but because even a year after its completion I can still can compare the series to my later work. My love of creating emotional, powerful, vivid and hard-hitting art runs through each new series I create, something that was born from this series. The series was developed over a number of months and as such there is not much I would like to change about it. The message I want to portray is evident, about how as a race we do need to drastically change our characteristics and activities in order to survive. In the future I would love to be able to develop the series further, with greater technical skill I will add new images, create spin-offs and possibly re-create certain images through experimentation with different photographic processes in order to get the best I can from this series, something that I know attending university will allow me to do.