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The British Journal of Photography is arguably one of the most prominent photography magazines in the 21st century. It's articles are in depth explorations, not only into concepts within photography, but work created by artists, providing lengthy insights into the people behind the images.

An article that recently caught my eye was the piece that appealed to my spiritual side. The article entitled 'Kelly O'Brien pieces together an image of her late father with the help of spirituality and clairvoyance' by photo journalist Daniel Milroy-Maher, talks about Kelly O'Brien's project 'Are You There?'. A project in which she tries to understand who her father was through the use of clairvoyance. This is a somewhat controversial topic as most people would argue that clairvoyance isn't a real thing, the dead stay dead and we no longer have any means to contact them or to understand their motives during life.

The article talks about how when O'Brien was growing up, there were no cameras or photographs, this meant that there's very few images of her family within her family albums especially around the time of her growing up. This lack of documentation of her early years has driven O'Brien into recording her family as much as possible.

One of the things that led her to work with clairvoyants was that her father's brother is something of a famous clairvoyant himself in the region in which O'Brien grew up. She attended some of her uncle's sessions without revealing her identity and became increasingly interested in the rituals. This inspired her to work with other clairvoyants for this project, focusing her lens on seances and other methods of communication with the deceased in order to create new interpretations of her father.

This project dances with the relationship between spirituality and photography, where photography is used mainly to capture and provide evidence and spirituality and clairvoyance being somewhat unprovable concepts.

What I really like about this project and what I hope to take forward through into my own work, is being able to toy between photography and concepts we can provide within it. O'Brien took something that can't necessarily be proven and photographed it in a way to deepen her own understanding of her dad. I feel like this is relative to my own project in which I'm taking women from myths, women that don't exist yet are symbolic of the stories of so many real women, and using photography not only to deepen my own understanding of the myths but also of the way women have been and are continuously oppressed, especially within our current political climate.