Maureen Dempsey had a fish fetish.

She feels that her fetish, like all fetishes, is one thing that makes her unique. It also provided the name for her show of photographs opening in the Holmes Student Center art gallery-“Special Fish.”

“Fetishes are born out of each person’s ability to view thw world differently. I’m attracted to the obsessiveness that people can feel about an object,” Dempsey said.

“Personally, I had a fish fetish for awhile. I find fish charming,” she added.

This is the second gallery show for Dempsey, a senior at NIU, and she noted that this show addressed a more specific train of thought than her show last spring.

Dempsey said she attempts to present objects in a way thatmakes them seem more “magical and interesting than they really are.”

“I’ll use a man or a woman’s body symbolically, attaching them to inanimate objects to suggest something of much broader meaning,” she said. “In my photos I try to capture a real life moment and transform it into something unreal.”

Dempsey said she likes working with photography, as opposed to other art forms because of the precess involved in producing photographs.

“I enjoy he wohole activity of shooting and developing and gradually working toward the final result. I get a lot of satisfaction out of working toward the final step,” Dempsey said. She added that she also likes the technical possiblities of photography.

Dempsey said she doesn’t like doing journalistic-type photography. “I’m afraid to point a camera at someone in public. I don’t like ‘taking’ pictures. I would rather say that I am making pictures,” she said.

She said she takes photographs because, “I can’t spell.”

“I can’t explain in words exactly what I do or what I mean by it so I like to produce images that evoke something that I feel,” Dempsey said.

She said her photos make personal statements, although they are not about specific experiences. “They’re just experiences of being me,” Dempsey said.

“Special Fish” opens Sunday, Nov. 18 at 3 p.m. and will run concurrently with the photos of NIU art student Roger Russell for two weeks.