Vancouver photographer Wendy D captures people's screams in new exhibit

Sometimes a person just wants to scream.

And for a decade Vancouver photographer Wendy D has been taking photographs of people doing just that.

Those photographs are now part of her new exhibition Scream, currently on display at Vancouver's Mainspace Gallery as part of the Capture Photography Festival.

"The thing about the photos that I love so much is that they're so real, and in the realness of the photos everybody is beautiful, even though they're screaming," she told The Early Edition's Margaret Gallagher.

Wendy D said she was inspired to do the project after a conversation with a fellow artist who complained of feeling so frustrated that he just wanted to yell out.

"He said, 'I feel like screaming,' and I said, 'That would be fun to photograph.'"

She said she gave her subjects three chances to scream while she photographed them, and said that though they'd often be nervous at first, they would soon loosen up.

"The second scream they'd just let it go, so it was pretty interesting," she said.

"Some people ended up laughing and some people really went deep and I had a couple of people that ended up crying."

She would also catch the reaction they had right after their scream.

"The photo that's afterwards its that glimpse of them being real, its just that moment before they realise they've just done something and they're really either proud or joyful or shocked that they've done it," she said.

"There are all kinds of reactions to it."

One of her good friends, Mandy Rushton, appears in several of the photographs in the exhibition.

She said it is "fascinating to bear witness to how you actually look."

"It looks extremely truthful," she said.

Wendy D is also running a social media campaign, asking people to take photographs of themselves or their friends screaming and then posting the pictures with the hashtag #myscreamphoto.

With files from CBC's The Early Edition

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