When posed with the question, “Who is your favorite author?” I enthusiastically reply with Edgar Allan Poe, confessing that, actually, he is one of the people I admire most. Yet, I admit that this was not always the case. I have always loved the occasional piece of Poe’s literature that would sporadically pop up in our reading books throughout grade and high school, but growing up, I thought Poe was a complete maniac. His short stories and poetry were the darkest literature I had ever encountered prior to Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” and before the first-year literature seminar I took this fall, I thought Poe was either mentally insane or clinically depressed for writing such demonic short stories including “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell Tale Heart.” However, the seminar completely altered my outlook on Poe. With my increased attention given to purpose in a short story, I have realized that Poe was not a trauma victim but rather a literary mastermind.
In my term paper, I analyzed how Poe was successful in generating the same effect on his readers in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell Tale Heart” by using different types of insanity: objective and subjective. I looked specifically at how the author creates two varying settings, a mental and a physical, to establish different relationships with his readers, but overall, instill the same feeling of horror. For my creative project, I wanted to expand further on Poe’s idea of insanity and imitate the method in which he was able to engineer emotions in readers. In his work, Poe relies heavily on the relationship between the narrator and his reader, very often established through the setting. Recognizing the importance of the setting led me to using photography as means for expressing insanity. I believe that, while interpretation is always left to the viewer, photographs allow the photographer to control which emotions are portrayed; the photograph itself acts as the photographer’s little square. Just as Poe was able to create a carefully constructed effect on his readers, my photos were meticulously designed to impress the extremes of my college experience that truly make it feel insane to me.
Instead of having random pictures depicting college insanity, I used quotes from “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” and modeled my photos from those. My goals for the collection included not only conveying my version of Poe’s short stories on a physical level, but also, almost most importantly, pairing the scenes with a designed emotion to create the desired response that I thought the words created. For example, my favorite quote from “The Black Cat” is, “I knew myself no longer,” spoken by the intoxicated narrator after gouging out his cat’s eyes. I believe this quote indicates the utter loss of self-restraint and the fear that accompanies losing control. I paired this quote with a picture of a ND shot glass surrounded by a mixture of drugs and M&M candies. On a physical level, I chose to incorporate the candy because it adds youth and irony to the picture; drugs seem more innocent and familiar when compared to candy. Plus, the candy portrays both the temptation (sweetness) of the drugs, especially for the super stressed college student, and the ease of obtaining and doing them. I contend that the obscurity of pairing candy with drugs not only creates a feeling of uncertainty and confusion for the viewer but also the same fear of losing control felt by Poe’s narrator.
For me, the most important and favorite part of the process was not taking the actual picture, but rather editing the photo to perfectly accompany a quote and fit into the collection as a whole. Throughout the whole project, I used Poe as my mentor for his systematic ability to take an emotion and create an objective sentence that impresses his decided effect on readers. Paired with a song by Muse titled “Super Massive Black Hole,” my final collection includes 26 photos that depicts my view on Poe’s idea of insanity and how it relates to my college world.
