Juggling Knives

Cindy-In-The-Box

Juggling Knives, 2022

On the morning of July 15, 2022, this picture didn’t exist yet. It wasn’t even an idea. By the end of the day, it was stirring in the upstairs of my head. What happened in-between? A comment by photographer Suzanne Rose during a portfolio review when I told her about an idea I was working on. Admittedly, it was a boring idea (me standing in the middle of a bunch of household crap that represented “women’s work”) and she honestly told me so. I tried making it anyway because I’m stubborn like that, but she was right. The idea was a big yawn.

But she also said that while she was listening to me describe it, for some reason she was sure I was going to say that I would be popping out of a jack-in-the-box in the middle of it. I hadn’t even thought of that but I tucked it away on a To-Do shelf up there in my imagination. What a fun prop with so many possibilities!!

I hunted around on the interwebbles until I found one on eBay. It arrived on July 24 and I got to work photographing it and putting together my costume. At first I photographed toys to juggle but my imagination was yawning again. Suzanne had told me that my best ideas had a “gotcha” in them. Something that was unexpected, something that might elicit a laugh.

After a family reunion we hosted at our house later that month (which didn’t have anything to do with the idea of juggling knives…or maybe it did…) I thought about juggling knives instead of toys. That made me laugh and I knew how I would do it! Immediately I got to work photographing a long sharp knife at different angles so that it would catch light on the blade sometimes and not others as I “juggled” several of them in the final photograph. I didn’t want it to look like the same shot of a knife being photoshopped over and over.

I used the background of the stage on the toy jack-in-the-box to be the stage my box was sitting on. It took a lot of tweaking and cloning of stars, and hours/days working on realistic shadows and hues.

It printed beautifully thanks to another workshop with Suzanne Rose about how to print our own work. Thank you, Suzanne! You made a difference in my artistic journey.