COSPLAY WITH FEAR
I work in a SEND school within the UK, so diversity and community are a large focus within my professional life. I work with students who have a large range of needs and I strive to support every person differently to let them shine. In my professional career, I work with a community of over 150 students who all have an EHCP and possibly similar needs, they are all diverse and unique.
Within the cosplay community, there is a diverse and large range of people who have shared similar experiences to the people I work with currently. Like within my professional career, my number one moral principle is being able to let everyone strive and excel, when other people do not believe in them or have not given the suitable tools to shine. My approach to working with people has changed drastically to where I consciously implement educational practices to ensure that every person working with me has a chance to achieve their best and that the boundaries such as using complex language or just relying on language to share ideas has been eliminated.
A large part of the community is neurodiverse, and the photo submitted aims to raise questions and awareness around this. This photo features Kosface, a member of the community who is neurodiverse. Seen by many, being neurodiverse is an “invisible disability limiting life, preventing people from obtaining qualifications, independence and financial stability.” However, neurodiversity needs to be celebrated as fundamentally their brain just functions differently to the majority of the population. This photo features Kosface as Ellie from The Last of Us. I decided to select this image out of the shoot to show off two stories:
The loneliness that a lot of disabled people can face through social isolation. For example, according to the UK Government between July and September 2022, only 52.6% of people with SEND were employed compared to 82.5% for non disabled people and disabled workers move out of work at nearly twice the rate of non disabled workers (between 2014-2021). A lot of disabled people can feel lost without a voice, because they have not been given the access arrangements by employers or reasonable adjustments by companies they may interact with regularly, such as quiet areas and special shopping hours where most of the public is prevented from being in the store.
The hurt and loneliness of Ellie caused by major plot points primarily during The Last of Us 2 act 1. There’s a very big scene within the game, that will not be spoiled here, but I feel that this one event massively impacts Ellie as a character. Getting to explore that theme and emotion created this powerful final image.
For this image, I shot low at Kosface on ground level to show more sad and hopeless emotions. Kosface used a spray bottle of water to create the tear that can be seen under their left eye. In a previous image, they wiped their face and that helps exaggerate the running makeup, dirt and grime to build more of a dirty image as opposed to a clean “perfect” makeup look. With this image we also didn’t care about the messiness of the wig and didn’t edit out the frays with the jacket, to help show that Ellie in that moment did not care about how she felt. We went for the hunched-up legs as well as the bad posture leaning more into the legs than the wall to build the sadness and carelessness. The image was lit using off camera flash, and with a wide aperture to help blur the background and darken down the scene, trying to create separation to emphasise loneliness and implying the image was shot at night. We decided to do this by making Kosface very small in the frame to use facial expressions and body language to drive the performance over the composition. Additionally chopping off part of the elbow and legs, I personally feel helps create that uneasiness of perfection towards more of a candid very personal moment. After the image was shot, I used colour grading to recreate the look of the game, as the scene was not ripped from the game.
kosface as Ellie Williams from The Last of Us II, photographed by cosplaywithfear
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