Defeat
This series of images depict jocks and athletes in an emotional state of despair, sitting alone in a foggy locker room, contemplating about the decisions that made in the game that they played. The images depict men at the most emotional state — mixing the complex emotion of losing a battle, contemplating the mistakes made, but also the strong desire to fight back in the battles and matches to come.
It dawned on me yesterday that there’s an underlying link among many of my works that I didn’t see before. Kissing, Sleeping, and Defeat — all three works share a common theme: vulnerability. I think that men are often expected to be strong — not just physically strong, but emotionally strong as well. As such, we idealized men with the most perfect muscular build; and we were told not to cry as a child.
Yet I find myself time and time again coming back to men who don’t mind showing a bit of emotion. I love photographing gay couples being lost in their own worlds kissing each other. I enjoy watching guys I date sleep, when nothing in their minds is telling them how they should act. I also enjoy photographing men when they’re not aware that they’re being photographed — in such state where they don’t feel the need to act differently because a camera is there. It’s really hard to portray that in photography because when you work with models, they feel the need to pose in certain way.
These are some of my earliest works in Midjourney. I have only published one of them before, and as I looked through my archive yesterday, I found many of them that I thought are representative of the feeling that I tried to portray, so I thought that I would post them as a series. I currently plan to remake this series inn Stable Diffusion such that I can have more control. It’s also fairly impossible to make these in Midjourney these days because of the increasingly aggressive content filters.
I placed the men inside a dark environment to set the right tone. I added fog to the scene so that I can create volumetric lights that would set the mood. Besides casting nice soft area lights, it creates a high contrast and the outline of the male figure without clearly showing the body very clearly. For some of these, I added “rim light” to push the effect further. (in photography, a rim light is placed behind a subject so that it creates the outline / rim of the subject as a fine line on the edge of the subject)
Text prompts in Midjourney v5.
Images
The images are not in any particular order, but I tend to put 3 images in a row on Instagram, with each set ordered from my personal favorite to the least favorite, and then making sure that the three first images work together as as triptych or simply compositionally pleasing.
