Leanne Surfleet
“My work is very personal and deals with themes of loneliness, nostalgia, anxiety & light. The main focus of my photography over the last 7 years has been self-portraiture. Starting out simply through curiosity, capturing self-portraits has become a major part of my life and work. It’s helped me overcome anxiety and fears over my own mortality, ensuring that a part of me will still be around after I am gone. Photography as a creative practice is very calming for me, and a great form of escapism. Light is integral to my work as I use it as a way of exposing and concealing myself, reflecting how I feel at the time of shooting it allows me to hide or come forward. Photography allows me to express myself in a way I never could achieve verbally."
I shoot predominantly with analog and instant cameras including 35mm, 120 medium format and both integral instant and pack film Polaroid cameras. I love to experiment with films and develop my own colour and black & white negatives. I find the aesthetics of shooting film is an important part of my work as it adds to the dream-like feel of the images, as well as the apparent dust and scratches that appear on my negatives, to me they are all a part of the process and a part of the documentation of myself and my surroundings.
I love to portray dreaming states within my photographs, giving the sense of memory and a familiarity that the viewer can relate to. I am currently working on a new project, which explores a certain anxiety I have been experiencing while sleeping. After I fall asleep I wake up frantically searching for light with an extremely confusing and unnerving feeling that I'm dead and stuck in a kind of limbo. I literally need light to wake up and realise that I'm still here. I’ve been exploring this through self-portraiture using double exposures and direct sunlight and the shadows and darkness that fill the room. This is currently a work in progress and ongoing."
Website: www.leannesurfleet.co.uk
Instagram: @leannesurfleet
Facebook: @leannesurfleetphotographySaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave