Rethinking family album. Initial object ideas

It was quite harder to find what objects can represent my family. At the beginning I wanted that my portrait and object images would be connected, would be about me and my sister. But I was really struggling with the idea, so I started thinking again what does family mean to me. Thinking about that I went back to my childhood memories and decided to show them in one picture. The reason why I did not wanted to do it from the beginning was that these memories awakes strong emotions.

My idea was to create mese-en-scene based on my childhood memories, where every object has a story behind. The stories that these objects hides are from the times when I was a very small child and what kind of experiences I've been through. The first scene that stands in my head is my parents drinking beer as they do every evening while watching TV and telling me to go to my room whenever I wanted talk with them, because television was always more important. The coin is the symbol of fear, it hides the moment when I first time realised that I am afraid of my father.

That is my first try:

The composition and lighting inspiration came from looking at Penny Klepuszewska project 'Living Arrangements'. This type of lighting helped me to express darkness and strengthened gloominess of my memories.