Vanitas? Check.

After the shower photos were received well by my class (which was a first. For the entire semester I was putting up shit on the walls, it was looking grim...) I was assigned a project by the professors based on my work thus far. 

The conclusion we came to was something vaguely along these lines: I sucked at still life photography. I rocked at self posed scenes. How about I do both?

The assignment I was given was to take a photograph of a Vanitas still life while including myself in the frame. This concept challenged me immediately, which was exciting. After doing some thought I came to a simple, funny solution. 

In most Vanitas paintings there is a skull or two staring out of frame. I figured rather than have a skull how about having my own head on a table? Then, instead of fruits and feathers and shit, how about fluorescent toys and trinkets? Sounds perfect. Too perfect. 

For the life of me, I couldn't get it to work. Tables fell over, you could see the slit of the cloth I was sticking my head through and the shutter of the camera would go off too soon. This image, in variation, is what I got. I could never get my head through so it instead looked like a crowning baby with a full set of hair:

Defeat. Long story short, I was fucked. No idea, no time and no motivation. I sat on the futon staring into space and said out loud:

"Fuck Vanitas. Who gives a shit?"

And that's when it hit me. How funny would a photo be of some dumbass, schmuck of an art student who made a shitty Vanitas out of crap laying around his apartment? Even better, what if we could see him celebrating the fact he just created an arrangement that (in theory) allowed him to acknowledge, accept and celebrate his own demise? Celebrating by, let's say, getting drunk in his underwear while watching TV?

Perfect. 

I'm so proud of the humor in these. From the sticker on the orange to the fish tank skull, it seeps of "last minute art school" and has a real, bonified fartist in action.