I am quite excited to post my first photoshoot in 2014!
This photoshoot is quite ridiculous for me now that I look back. I took the shoot with my aunt, Tante Dian! She is actually my bestie
Merlyn's mom, but as our family has been very close, I think it is fair enough to acknowledge her as my aunt (afterall, Tante Dian is very close to my mum). The whole photoshoot was totally spontaneous; one night, Tante Dian ask me, "Are you free tomorrow? Mas Djare wants to hold a shoot with you!" Mas Djare is a friend of Merlyn's family: he is a photographer, and I knew him since we helped Merlyn's charity together last Ramadhan. I had never joined any shoot he did so of course I was completely blank of the upcoming working condition, and for God's sake he told me almost literally a night before (yet he didn't tell me the theme, only some unhelping clues)! So I tried my best to improvise the whole thing I need to prepare for the next day's occasion.
The shoot went really well, even if I still regarded it for one of the most weirdest shoot I have ever done so far! The rush, the whole improvising thing... It doesn't mean that the shoot wasn't fun. It is fun, awkwardly hilarious! Just simply summarized, nothing can beat doing photoshoot with your aunt. You have to try it by yourself to know what it's like.
The title...
Well, improvisation: The title was inspired by what Tante Dian said at the photoshoot. Mas Djare was taking a single shoot of me and she commented on my pose. "Akib was a theatre actor," she said to Mas Djare, "No wonder he can do such dramatic poses."
That comment somehow got stuck in my mind. It hit me right because somehow, rather ridiculously, I have always been such of a drama queen. It is like my whole life was a theatre performance; and more than that, I live it consciously, like I am preparing an autobiography or a biopic of me. In a certain stage of my life, I imagined my life as truly a drama film naively, made me a very mellow person. A real live, 24/7 drama queen.
But I am not ashamed of that. In an artistic context, being dramatic helps me to expand. I always like a sense of theatricality in my works; theatre helped me to expand my aesthetique taste. Theatre world even has taught me to be adaptive and quick to improvise things: it helped me to changing my skin fastly and not afraid of any makeover. There is a quotation from Erika Linder, an androgyny model, which I think relate myself very much. She said that, "I have too much imagination for just one gender." And that is myself: I have too much imagination to handle one character only. I have a lot of personalities and capabilites. Didn't mean that I have split personality disorder, still; I just love so much to not being a person who I am; or, more precisely, to live a side of my multiple, diamond like personalities. I think that also explained why I joined theatre club in my high school.
That rhetorical showed in this shoot, which one I have cut my hair to be more masculine in a more androgyny-identity finding struggle (I will post this in another time, I suppose); from the very feminine previous photoshoot of "Mars and Venus", I tried to show more masculine duality. I try to live a different aspect of my androgynism. I am experimenting.
And if those explanations didn't work, well; afterall, I have fallen in love with theatrical world since I was in elementary school, and no matter how I thrive in other subjects, I will always love theatrical performances.
Not like any prologue I have ever written, this one is perhaps the most sappy and shallow one for you, Reader. But I deliberately will excuse myself. Somehow, for me myself, this photoshoot is one of the very personal shoot for me. I think I knew the reason why at the beginning, but as the time gone, I have forgotten them, even though I could still feel the impact. But whatsoever. Sometimes, you just couldn't explain things that are very important to you, because your subsconscious wanted to keep them merely for yourself. I think that is what personal means. And I am not being dramatic in this thing.
