This is a piece of work by a young photographer Nicolas Bruno. For my first blog post and first research piece of the term I have chosen him and his work to talk about as I have briefly looked at his work before and I think the ideas behind his work are really interesting.
Nicolas Bruno has sleep paralysis which keeps him in a halfway state from being asleep and being awake. He bases all of his images on his dreams, he has always had very extreme and sometimes bizarre nightmares which started when he was a child and ever since his teenage years he has turned these nightmares into incredible pieces of work like the one you see above. He tries to make his images as realistic to the nightmares he has whilst making them appealing to everyone viewing them. You can also see similarities in lots of his images as there are many similarities in his nightmares/dreams.
My favourite image of his that I have seen so far is this one above, mainly because it is quite different to most of the nightmares/images that I have previously seen from him. I also really like the vintage feel to this image and the upside down cross in the middle of the covered face is really intriguing and it has basically got me thinking more about how this nightmare of his and how it must have been to re create all of his nightmares as images for people to see and talk about.
Even though his images are considered haunting and even bizarre, the are extremely suggestive and are calling the observer to participate in the sense of enrolling their own associations or perhaps dealing with their own anxieties and fears. This is why I think Bruno’s work is phenomenal as I am constantly interested in how an image makes me feel as well as other people and what effect it can have on those people and for some images society.
I could only find one other photographer who uses there dreams as inspiration (Ronen Goldman) but personally I prefer Nicolas Bruno’s work as they are more haunting and very realistic to his actual nightmares. This is because sleep paralysis causes you to wake up but your body is still asleep which mean Bruno is able to remember almost everything that happens in his nightmares which makes an amazing image but must be quite terrifying. He then sketches/writes down his nightmares in his dream journal and eventually sketches a final idea before he goes out to shoot the idea.
ZAKARIAH 