At First Sight

At First Sight is a photographic series of thirty-three images exhibited in varying formats and scales. The project includes analogue photographs of portraits, landscapes, and staged experiments alongside historical reprints of educational scientific drawings. The work continues to develop my research around love, betrayal, and fantasy through the investigation of the phenomenon of love at first sight. The project explores personal experience whilst navigating the subject through the work of neuroscientists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. Using photography as a tool for documentation and staging, my aim was to unravel the personal experience of falling in love at first sight. In my search for the truth I turned to science, Mother Nature, and other people’s accounts of this romantic phenomenon. Science challenges the romantic, fairy-tale, happily-ever-after notion of love. Turning to Charles Darwin’s seminal text On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (published in 1859), and research by academic Alfred Kinsey who wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), and second book about female humans and sexual behaviour five years later, I found the counter argument to my experience; I could not investigate the romance of humans without employing science to explore love at first sight in a critical, objective way. The project's aim was to utilise the photographic image to convey the fantastical emotions and experiences associated with love at first sight, whilst conversely employing its seemingly objective nature to counter these with scientific imagery.