The Smiths got their name because Morrissey said he chose it because it was
the most ordinary name and it was time the ordinary folks to rise. Also, Rebecca
told me there was a band named "James". With all of this, I thought Jane
would be a good name, and it reminded of Jane Eyre, and how the characters in
the book said Jane was a plain girl.
The album name I got from a poem by Dorothy Parker. Her poem was called "Résumé"
which is French for "summary". The poem goes as follows:
"Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live."
The poem is about suicide, and I thought it was appropriate because the
narrator of the poem seems to fell detached and isolated from their
environment, and so does our performer. "
Résumé" is also a good album name to describe the album itself,
as the album could be a "summary" of the performer/band's life.
The album cover picture is a still from
the film "Huckleberry Finn" 1985, in which Patrick day plays Huck Finn.
In this particular still Huck is being pursued and to avoid being caught
he disguises himself as a girl. Our performer
in the music video also cross dressed, playing with gender, and bringing in Judith
Butler's gender trouble: gender is no longer seen as fixed identities i.e. male
= masculine, female = feminine. In this way our album cover is related to our
music video.
The other pictures are all photographs I took at various times.
The photo of the book and the photographic
film I took around three years ago one beautiful Sunday morning on a whim. It
was all an accident that I noticed what I was seeing would make a good photo. The
colour original looks really good, maybe even better than the black and white
version, but all the images need to go well together, and I couldn't seem to
get all the colours to work together.
The next image is that of some flowers.
This is also a photo I took a number of years ago. It’s a photo of my gloved
hand holding the little flowers at an angle. I didn’t really have a reason for
taking a picture of it. I selected it for the Digipak because I was thinking of
Morrissey – when asked why he was always holding flowers, Morrissey replied
that flowers are beautiful and charming and they don’t hurt anyone.
This frame underneath is a photo belonging to “the little black jacket” project
I saw when for
photography (the subject) we were taken to the
Saatchi gallery. I don’t know if we were allowed to, but I took many pictures
while looking around. This is only a section of the original image – I had to
crop it to get only that photo. I don’t know who the man, but he looks sad and
alone, playing the violin as if to comfort himself – the mood fits our themes.
Last year I went to France to meet my
mother and brother, for the summer. My mother took me to “Le Musée de Rodin”
and again I took many pictures. This is one of Rodin’s statues. I don’t know
what it’s called because I forgot to take a picture of its name, but the
statue’s body language is full of anguish and although our theme isn’t as
intense, the photo and the statue go well with the
other photographs.
The last photo is of my hand with writing on it. this photo I had to take
while doing the digipak draft because I couldn’t find a fifth image that would
look good with the other images, so I quickly decided to write something on my
hand with a biro, because that thought had been on my mind all day that day. At
first I was going to write one bold word on it, like “love” or something, like
I had seen people do on the internet (and because it was 11pm and I was really
really tired).
But then I thought it
would be more interesting to cover my whole hand in writing – it looks better,
and also I liked the thought of people wondering what is written on the hand
and trying to read it, because humans are curious by nature and want to know
everything. So I looked through my poem book and selected one by W. H. Auden
named “Song: Stop all the clocks”, because it is about loss and I liked it. After
I finished I realised not enough of my hand was covered in writing, so around
the main poem by Auden I loosely wrote bits of the poem “The Walk” by Thomas
Hardy. I then used my coat for the black background (I had to make-do with what
I had) and took pictures of the written-on hand in various angles. It was
difficult to make my hand look limp and natural, you can’t see it but my arm
was all twisted as I had to bend and stoop to take the picture. Out of all the
ones I took this was my favourite.
I turned the photos black and white because i didn't want the colours distracting the eye from the composition, and also "the memory of childhood" is something that seems part of our themes - the photos aren't sepia, as if if the person could remember strongly enoough they'd be able to get back their memories vividly in colour again, but they're black and white, all the colours drained out.
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