a Linh Linh blog: August 2008

We were asked to make a photomontage/ collage from free stock single images.
I picked the topic related to "mental illness", my idea is that untreated or under-treated mental illness may raise the crime in society. Above are 2 version of my work, one with text and one not. I can not decide myself which one is better so I upload here both. However I submitted the one without text.
Below is my explanation of the theme:

At first I chose the topic “mental illness”, however it turns out to be such a large topic to work with. When doing research, by chance I came into very interesting news: untreated mental illness may lead to the patient’s committing crime, thus I decide to take this information as the topic of my work, as a result I will made the theme based on a both realistic and horror atmosphere. As the topic idea is a problem related to society and mental illness, I want to construct it with real photographs and the best place for me to take nice shots and high quality photos are from free stock exchange image website.
My collage was made using 8 different images blend in together.
The first chosen image is the hospital corridor photograph. At first I simply want to express a gloomy space related to illness in the background. After that I use an image of a man touching his forehead, looking like he is having a headache and made it blend into the corridor image using multiply layer. My idea of doing this is, I believe that each people has a private imaginary room of thought inside their head, however people with mental illness are stuck and can not get out of their own “room”, thus they can not live normally like other people (the image of a bold man screaming and wanting to get out represents this idea). The top right of the collage is an x-ray photograph of a human brain/ head/ skull, which helps explaining the problem with the man having headache, who actually is having a mental illness. Furthermore, the fact that mental illness without right treatment or untreated may lead to stress and bad behavior among patients, those can finally end up with their committing suicide or even worse, crime, is what I want people to feel when looking at my collage. Therefore I decorate the theme with blood and a photo of a woman scarily screaming in pain. The place where I put the woman photo is the same as the position of the man’s ear, which also means that the voice talking inside mental patient head (a symptom of mental illness), without treatment, is getting louder and louder until the patient can not control anymore and finally gave up by following the voice instruction to do bad things.
This collage was made to call for balance treatment to people who have mental illness; because after all even mental patient do unusual things and can not control themselves, they were still born human like any of us, and nonetheless, it’s true that mental illness can be treated and many patients have been though this illness and become normal person after a period of treatment time.
This problem, however, should be seriously concerned in Vietnam, where the fact that untreated illness and under treatment to mental patient happen almost everywhere everyday, this is blamed mostly for the country lacking of financial situation, but if this problem continues and not be solved right, it may cause the society rise of crime as warned.
In conclusion, I named my collage “Untreated mental illness causes the rise of crime in society”.

Do Thuy Linh, sem2 2008, explaination of the theme , Assignment 2A , electronic image and design