“Search for the hero inside yourself, search for the secret inside.” (M People, 1998)

Super-heroes in contemporary culture are framed as destructive, socially dysfunctional ‘beings’ with extra-ordinary CGI enhanced super-powers.  An example would be the characters in the ‘The Avengers’ Marvel action hero franchise. Sometimes their ‘machismo’ is ameliorated by a kindly persona (as with Clark Kent) with hidden frailties (Kryptonite), but in characters like Iron Man, Tony Stark exhibits the ‘Dark Triad’ characteristics of personality; narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism (Jonason et al, 2012). ‘Niceness’ is not their virtue and ‘saving the world’ is their vice.

Here is my ‘stable’ of anti-superheroes. They don’t have a collective noun because they don’t want one and are content to live ‘below the radar’ as they live their ordinary and extra-ordinary lives amongst us.

M People’ sing about the “hero inside ourselves” (M People, 1998). Kaufman constructs a fantasy novel where everyone has an ‘ordinary’ super-power apart from the main protagonist  (Kaufman, 2006). My theoretical framework for this assignment was an exploration of Jung’s ‘shadow’ and ‘anima and animus’ aspects of the psyche (Hopwood,  2008). As in the song, Jung finds the “masculine” aspects of the psyche such as autonomy, separateness, and aggression and the “feminine” aspects such as nurturance, relatedness, and empathy, are found in most people  (Hopwood, 2008). I asked my sitters to explore and describe their visible and hidden positive creative attributes that they could imagine fantastically in supernatural form. My discussion with my subjects led to an awareness of the gendered and non gendered forms of their special skills and super-powers. This shows itself overtly in the character names chosen by my anti-heroes. ‘Mrs Green,’ for example, who is female, identifies herself as ‘feminine’ but ‘Visio-Spatial,’ who is also female, has no gender.

What I found in this work is that this group of sitters smiled and talked a lot. This is not thought to be a good thing in contemporary photography, but it is a reflection of their innate positivity and hopeful demeanour. This is something which we can find in most of us (Kaufman, 2006). 

References

M People. (1998). Search for the hero. The Best of M People, M People Records.

Peter Jonason, G. W., David Schmitt, Norman Li, Laura Crysel (2012). “The Antihero in Popular Culture: Life History Theory and the Dark Triad Personality Traits,” Florida Review of General Psychology 16(2): 192-199. http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/normanli/JonasonWebsterSchmittLiCrysel2012.pdf

Hopwood, A. (2008). “Jung’s model of the psyche.” Retrieved June 6th, 2016, from http://www.thesap.org.uk/resources/articles-on-jungian-psychology-2/about-analysis-and-therapy/jungs-model-psyche/.

Kaufman, A. (2006). All my friends are superheroes. United Kingdom, Telegram.