NATHANIEL C. SHANNON

    A confession is a statement made by a person or a group acknowledging some personal fact that the person (or the group) would prefer to keep hidden. The term is generally associated with an admission of a moral or legal wrong. A legal confession is an admission of some wrong-doing that has legal consequence, while a confession in religion is usually more akin to a ritual, by which the person acknowledges thoughts or actions considered sinful or morally wrong within the confines of the confessor's religion. Socially, however, the term may refer to admissions that are neither legally nor religiously significant.

    By using an anonymous submission form via Facebook, I collected users “confessions" over the course of one year. The users were instructed to confess whatever they wished to share that was weighing them down. After the deration of a year had passed, I closed the submission form and began the second part of producing this series. The most cohesive of the confessions were then hand written by me as a uniform visual narrative representing the unity of man’s “original sin”. I used social media as vessel to collect the confessions because of my fascination with the ease of how brutally honest humans are when hiding behind a computer screen.  There is honesty between people on the Internet when the pressure of physical interaction is removed from conversation, which paralleled the tradition of Catholic confession. The computer is the booth and I am the Priest. I then photographed these "confessions" within a jar of water, using a mixture of blood and ink to represent the "confession" being absolved as the words bled off the page.