English Lit is more important than you think.

In my last year at sixth form, we studies Gothic literature for English Lit, reading the likes of Frankenstein, Macbeth and The Bloody Chamber. My favourite out of these three texts was The Bloody Chamber, a collection of 10 short Gothic stories taken from classical fairy tales, by Angela Carter. Each of the 10 stories are versions of normal fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast and Red Riding Hood, but Carter changes them up and makes them so much darker than they originally were. These 'adult' fairy tales are loaded with sex and gore and steer well away from literature containing the damsel in distress and focus' more on the less stereotypical femme fatal, each story focusing on a strong female protagonist rather than the knight in shining armor. I loved it for how twisted and dark the stories were and how Carter went against the grain with these Gothic tales. 

But how does this book link to my photography work? Well a few weeks ago I got given a brief for a new project for my FdA Photography course, the brief was explained that we were going to be given one word and we had to create a whole photographic or moving image piece based around this word. The word we all got was 'Recycle', and you may be wondering how I've managed to link a book of Gothic short stories to recycling, it's simple really. Angela Carters stories are recycled themselves, going a far back as being told as folk tales, long before anyone like The Grimm Brothers or Hans Christian Anderson had written them down. These stories have them been retold many times in many different ways, most of them now ending up as glamourized , Disney cartoons for young children, but most people are unaware of how grotesque the original tales actually were. 

These stories have been recycled basically, which leads back to the photography, and I myself am going to recycle these already recycled stories into modern day versions of Angela Carters 10 short stories in photography form. So after finally deciding on this idea for my photography project, I started thinking about how useful it was that I had read that book last year and how much I remembered from it, an I never would have thought I would have used it as part of my photography degree a year later. 

So I guess you should always try and remember what you learnt at school or sixth form or college, because you never know when you'll need the information or when you'll take inspiration from it. 

India X