Cian Sheehan

Growing up in the early 2000’s I lived in an era where media was becoming more prevalent than ever, and having a combination of both of my parents being very musically inclined, and having a Blockbuster not far from my home, I had no shortage of this. Ever since I can remember, both music and film have been very important to me on many levels. In recent years my love for both has blossomed into something much more though. I look at film and music through a much more refined lens and see them as a truly elevated art form.

An album can tell a story just like a movie, taking you on a journey starting in one spot, and leaving you in a space you couldn’t have imagined yourself in. Few albums have done this for me in recent years but one that came out just last year managed to. Artist Benjamin Lasky, better known by his stage name Quadeca came out with his third studio album I Didn’t Mean To Haunt You in November of 2022. This album tells the story of a ghost stuck in a sort of “limbo” in between the real world and fading into nothingness. It explores themes of grief and loneliness in a very profound way through the story of this ghost. 

After really delving into my love of film over the past 4 years I’ve had so many artists I look up to, from Damien Chazelle, to Richard Linklater, to Steven Spielberg, there’s no shortage of film greats that I consider top class visionaries. They all pick up a camera and see things through a different lens each time and it makes for some of the most visually striking moments you can experience in your lifetime. But what I felt I was missing in my admiration for these people is a sense of relation to them. As an 18 year old high school student, there’s little to no directors, writers, or cinematographers that I can look to as peers, but I was able to have that experience through music.

Having been a fan of Quadeca for years now and seeing the drastic shift he’s had from being a young aspiring rapper to man making an alternative, folktronica, concept album about grief and loss, it’s stuck with me. Us also being very close in age also hit home on a different level. I’m someone who’s dabbled in what feels like almost every artform and to see someone else start out in a similar spot that I did and see how they came to such a pivotal moment is very inspiring to me.

When I listen to music I tend to have a very visual experience with it, taking the feel of a song and envisioning what a visual to it would look like and this album was no exception. As an aspiring filmmaker, in recent years I’ve taken a closer look at the movies I love and analyzed what the visual language of a film is doing to tell a story. So when deciding that I wanted to piece together my own visual story for this album for this project I wanted to put my skills to work.

I decided to go through each song and pick a couple of lyrics to create a visual for, to then end up with what almost looks like stills from a movie about this album. I wanted to confine the story to just my home, making it feel like the ghost just can’t let himself move on to anything else while in this state. The color palette shifts from picture to picture but I wanted to stick with whites, yellows, blues, and blacks because they can all range from having a very comforting tone to something a bit more haunting. I wanted to push myself with this project to combine all the different aspects of not only photography that I’ve learned over the last 3 years, but also my storytelling ability to take something that’s already pre-established and make a somewhat throughline story for it all. 

Grief is something that I haven’t necessarily had to experience much of in my life but the beauty of a great story is the way it can make you feel something. For me this album made me experience something I haven’t felt before and I hope that through these photos you too can also experience some level of that same feeling.