What made me happy about Revelations is that it was truly a release of energy. During a couple of years, I “flirted” with used clothes. They were something I really cherished. I mainly bought them because they had colors or patterns I couldn't find on newly bought garments.
As I was studying Fashion Design, my first attempt was to dismantle the clothes I bought on second-hand shops or flea markets and to use their fabric to make new designs: a new skirt, a new shirt, a new dress... (Although I don’t think I succeeded on making nice things, in the end.)
So, as I said, I "flirted" with used clothes. That means that I often bought them, even if not to wear them myself. After the first approach didn't succeed, I kept a couple of them.
But that became a habit.
One of the main tasks behind this is to actively search for them. By "them" I mean, for those clothes that when I see them on a second-hand shop I just have this click feeling: "This is it!" Or, better, "this is one of them!"
Active search, visit second-hand shops regularly. Buying, collecting.
I am passionate about colors. Anything colorful attracts me in a way I can’t fully describe. So, when buying the clothes, I went mainly for the colorful ones.
The task of collecting clothes and keeping them, as well as waiting for “an apple to fall on my head.” Or like a revenge, a dish that one eats cold.
Speaking of revenge, maybe the Revelations were some sort of revenge. But not that other people needed to know it, just myself, and be incentivized by it, as it was as well a reward.
I mean a revenge against all the bad thoughts that told me that "I am ugly." For a person who didn’t like his self-image, I was brave to portray myself at the moment I made those photos. But I just did so because I had a purpose, I was a tool to convey an idea.
There was not much of a research to get into that result. One day I had the idea that I could wear the colorful clothes (the ones I had been collecting) on the days I was feeling sad and that I should photograph myself wearing them. The sketches were made in front of the bathroom's mirror. They were very non-pretentious, but they had a very fine presence, and I could perceive something nice could come out of them.
The next step was to polish those first portraits I made in the bathroom. I made a simple set in my room. One flash light from one side, and natural light from the window.
The essential component was sadness: I should make the portraits in a day I was sad. Sadness is a crappy sentiment. It’s not melancholy. The revenge Revelations meant was also against this kind of unproductive feeling.
I invited a friend and asked her to click the photos for me. I also verified on her how the lighting was.
I don't have a clear answer on why I’ve chosen the "clinical typological" approach. Maybe because I’m very fond of the work of photographers Bernd and Hilda Becher, and I find what they do both sincere and poetic? An influence of them, I guess. Maybe lack of technical aptitude to make photographic pyrotechnics? Maybe.
Whatever the answer is, it is just that the whole process was very intuitive. I was guided by the material I had in hands, and my knowledge of things. There was a bit of a feeling of how I wanted everything. Colorful clothes for "happy", and a sad poker face for "sad"; and the combination of the contradictory in the images.
It is more or less a common sense that "people express themselves by the clothes they wear." That the clothes are the expression of one's personality. I don't know if I agree 100% with that, but by giving the series the name of “Revelations”, I was indeed guided by that notion.
But maybe what I was revealing was not much my personality, like "I am a happy person, but I'm feeling sad." It was more of a revelation of "my precious", in the Lord of The Rings sense. Of some of the things that were precious to me. Somehow I had to show what I did, what I was able to do, what I liked to do, what I paid attention at, what I cared for etc. And they became those photographs.