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.