My upside down moment

Falling Bodies

My own work for a change - this one is in progress. For a year I have been obsessively photographing people in freefall, in the studio. For most of that year, everyone seemed to think I was mad, but it never seemed impossible, just difficult - I used to worked in a circus where we would get up to much worse.

I don't want to explain in detail how it was done, just that the falls were 'proper' (some from more than 5 metre height); it was important to me that they were 'real' in the sense that real height had to be involved. I took the images on large-format film, never more then one per fall. This introduced a necessary element of chance into an otherwise very controlled situation.

It took some time to get it right: some of the images of 'normal' people (see the woman in orange) don't read so much as a fall - more like a hover. In the end I collaborated with a group of acrobats. I explained to them that I wanted their bodies to flail, explode with movement, to look crushed by gravity; so they improvised moves for the camera, some of them very challenging. The images yielded from that session look much more like falling.

I feel that this throws up some interesting questions about the real and the fake. I feel that, through a series of elaborations, I have arrived at a different kind of ‘real’.

Please come and see this work at my degree show on 9-14 June 09 at LondonMet in Whitechapel, for further details please go my website at http://www.annettehabel.com