How images evoke inner repressed feelings and memories

Looking up at the picture above, how does it make it you feel?

How does an empty room with no one in it look like and feel like? Does it seem odd? Comforting? Strange?

Does it make you think of a memory of something in your childhood?

Does it give you a chill? Does it do nothing at all to you?

I discovered a video series the other day from a Youtuber called MiacDaled that seemed to express something that I believe a lot of people, including myself, seem to all understand yet cannot put into (the right, best kind of)words.

Pictures are very powerful, and can unlock visceral, repressed emotions and memories within your psyche and throughout your entire mode of sensory reactions.

Something seemingly irrelevant like a football field at night with harsh lighting could evoke something within you----something you thought your forgot, or something you wanted to forget.

The channel goes into fears as well, incorporating seemingly innocent, almost banal images that somehow terrify you. It might be the angle of the shot, or the close up, or even the far away perspective---but sometimes the most common and minute detail of the everyday can be the most terrifying thing given the right circumstances.

And another aspect of sometimes mixed media(I assume it is anyway), is the uncanny aspect of objects and scenery at times---things that seem too vivid or too lackluster in places and too detailed in others----an unnatural feeling of something looking too normal to be real.

This video sums up that feeling. Whether it is in dreams, or in life.

Taking photographs of landscapes that feel familiar even if they are not---you know that they are not a part of your actual memories, but something about them feels like they are. A missing piece of a puzzle you didn't know you needed to look for. This is what some of these photos evoke to me. What do they evoke to you?

Dreams are the links to our everyday lives, and even as something as strange and odd as these photographs might be, they also might serve as a clue to our own inner turmoil, interpersonal troubles, lackluster careers or feelings of inadequacy.

Photographs can also be a link to our past, present and future.

I have a love/hate relationship with photographs---in one way they can serve as a platform to connect humanity, showing our struggles, our pain, our happiness and our fear. Sometimes it can show us something that is the exact opposite of how we feel.

Sometimes a photo can tell you more about how a person is feeling than with words.

Next time you look through your old family albums, really look at them. Look at the expressions, the body language and the way their eyes look.

The way your eyes looked. Were they sad, happy, mopey, red from crying earlier that day?

Do you remember how you felt when you had that particular photo taken? The mood of the evening or event? The dynamics of the group you were in?

Photos can be historical and representative of times in your life---if you really look to see all the details in them.

Images, with or without people in them, have the power to evoke strong emotions from us.

Using pictures in conjunction with writing, like how Vocal lets their members use them in our stories and articles, help piece together an entire puzzle---an history, a story----and it can help creators and readers relieve that repressed tension and fear.

It tells us---we are not alone:

In one single photograph and one single story.

-Melissa