Suzanne Opton

 Joe Seck

11/1/2022

Art 240


                                        Suzanne Opton


Suzanne Opton inspired me for this assignment because of her focus on the men and women and the results on their mental state after experiencing the horrors of war and how those can affect your psyche. What she did was take photos of soldiers that have spent time in war and each photo has the name of the amount of time they had spent deployed. She spoke about what she was trying to accomplish with these photos by stating “I hoped to photograph the invisible. I thought that by looking in the face of a young person who had witnessed something unforgettable we might imagine what he had seen or done, or not done.” She wanted to see how war would affect people and if you could see the result by just looking into their eyes. In each one of the photos that I saw from Opton I could feel the emptiness in the eyes of those she photographed, so she did what she set out to do: photograph the invisible. In her photos, she used a soldier and put their faces on the floor with their cheeks pressed up against the floor. I tried to create an exact copy of this with one of my images while using blue light as my only source of light. Opton uses the eyes of the men and women to speak volumes about their lives, what they’ve seen, what they have done, and perhaps something they are running from. A lot of these images Opton took of the soldiers are ones that speak to the horrors they saw and all of these images are so interesting as the eyes of the soldiers tell stories and how not a single one is homogenous, everyone has a different story or a different way to interpret things and I think Opton understood that while taking these images,
so this is what I looked to copy. 

I took inspiration from her through her use of colors and angles. Her photos aren’t as colorful as the ones I took, but the monotone and bleak atmosphere was what I was trying to capture. In the photos I took with her inspiration I was trying to capture male anguish, her photos aren’t tied to gender but I felt that mine should look at the problems males might have such as drinking problems, and other sorts of mental health awareness.


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