I'm pretty enamored with Nine Inch Nails (and Trent Reznor, as well, no doubt) lately and I've been channeling that in different ways. One of the ways, was the "Closer" drawing, for example.
It's difficult not to idolize him and the music, but I guess it's also easy to do, when you don't know jackshit about somebody. But that's completely besides the point, this isn't about my thoughts on NIN, it's about the most recent channel.
The most recent channel, was a mental image that I had of "Sunspots", which is a ridiculously sexy song, in my opinion. The song, as I've read here and there, is about heroin, like "With Teeth", and it's referred to as a seductive woman. This is because Trent was a junk addict for a good while.
I think one of the oldest memories I have that refer to heroin, is a documentary that I saw, where I very clearly remember this dude injecting some shit that looked like tar right into his neck. So, heroin's always been some kind of tar substance for me and after looking up the appearance of heroin, there is a kind of heroin called "black tar heroin". Which works perfect for what I had in mind.
Also, according to what little I've read about heroin and what I learned about it from "Trainspotting", the high from heroin is absolute pleasure, a kind of orgasmic, sexual pleasure. So I guess it makes sense for it to be thought of as a sexual and seductive woman, if you're a dude or just somebody that likes women in general.
The lines from the song "She turns me on/she makes it real/I have to apologize/For the way I feel", kind of stand out, even though my favorite line from the song probably is "peel off our skin we're going to burn what we were to the ground/Fuck in the fire and we'll spread all the ashes around". So these pictures revolve around the four lines from the chorus and correspond kind of as the title for each of the four pictures.
My mental image is a jet-black woman/creature type, and the pictures are a progression: The moment when you see her passive, the moment when she sees you, the moment when she's seducing you and the moment when there's some sort of inexplicable pleasure.
She's not meant to be necessarily beautiful, she's meant to be a strange and intimidating personification of heroin. There is also a progression in the poses in the pictures, she starts by looking down and her head progressively looks up, up to the last picture. I wanted the pictures to be as symmetric as possible, but for the last two, I didn't like how it looked with the face being full front. It was much nicer to look at with a 3/4 angle.
So it can be said, in a way that this is what "Sunspots" looks like to me, kind of my interpretation of the song. My personal interpretation, which could be wrong, but that doesn't matter to me.
The photographer is Jose Esteban, that's a link to his Facebook page, where you can see more of his really cool work. He offered to collaborate with me in this idea and was super great to work with.
