Psalm 42

ARTIST STATEMENT: MEGHAN MEDLEN
Being a portrait photographer, my ultimate goal with every project is to tell a story. For a small amount of time, I am invited into people’s lives and I receive an incredible opportunity to capture their story. Having your portrait made is a vulnerable thing. However, through imagery I get to show someone the beauty that is in themselves, in their seasons of life, or in those small, fleeting moments that would otherwise be forgotten. I get to take their memories and turn them into art.

I am a digital photographer but I find a large source of my inspiration in film photographs. The art of double exposure in photography originally began with film photography. A double exposure is a combination of two images where one image is overlaid onto another at less than full opacity. In digital photography double exposures can be created using a few different techniques, but for this series I chose to create them using my digital camera. I took a portrait of a person and a separate photograph of water and overlaid them together using my camera.

In preparation for this project, I found so much encouragement and hope in the psalmist’s words. Though the author is in the midst of deep sorrow, he repeatedly reminds us that pain is temporary and he will praise God again. Personally, difficult seasons in my life have felt all consuming and hopeless, but verse 11 encourages and reminds me that, when I do find myself in times of sorrow, I will Praise God again and his presence will be felt.

For this series, I mainly focused on the water imagery of the psalm. In verses 1 and 2, the psalmist describes that our soul’s deep desire for God is as essential as water. And like a thirst that never quenches, God never leaves us, and neither does our soul’s desire for Him, even if we can’t feel him in times of hardship. In verse 7, we also find water as a comparison to how sorrow can often overcome us. Lament crashes over us like waves. However, the psalmist finds hope in waiting for God, and we can hope during times of lament and sorrow because these seasons of pain become a part of us and our stories. The psalmist both needs God as “a deer who pants for water,” but has also experienced God like “waves [that] have passed over” him. Each subject in the photographs has sorrow in their lives that has become a part of their story, representative of the hope found in the Living Water. By double exposing pictures of water over portraits of people, I wanted to show how, like flowing water, our pain and tragedy shapes us as people, giving us a hope to praise Him again.