Thursday 17 February 2011

Bedrooms

One of our new projects is entitled 'The Photographic Bookwork'. Well I think you can all guess what the end product of this project will be, yes a professional book. I am really excited about this project as the content can be whatever we want, and as a huge reader myself, I can not wait to see my work in the context of a professional book. So I have been thinking very hard at what I want to do for it.

A few months ago I went to the Tate Modern and saw a room exhibiting Simryn Gill's newest project 'Dalam'. The room was filled with colourful prints that Gill had taken of strangers front rooms in Dalam. She literally knocked on random doors and asked to photograph their front room, all taken from exactly the same angle, style and format to create a repetitive view of hundreds of different rooms. Due to the culture these rooms really let us have an insight to the lives of others, especially as it is a very religious place, so the rooms often held many religious artifacts, which got me to thinking about our culture.

As you already know, I am fascinated in people and what makes someone who they are. In this country we aren't particularly religious and many houses hold no signs of our religious culture, instead for me, bedrooms are the most personal space we own and are really the insight in to showing what that person is like. With this idea in mind, I want to make a book of bedrooms, from young children to the elderly and every age in between. The reason I want to do this is because for me, my bedroom is a private space, somewhere that is completely my own and holds everything special to me. Especially as I am a student and therefore do not own my own house, only two separate rooms in a house that either my parents own or I rent. I find that whenever I go into someone else's bedroom I always love to snoop around as in my opinion it really shows you what that person is about. At the moment I am thinking of doing one whole bedroom shot for every person, done in exactly the same format, position etc and then a detailed shot of something that either catches my eye or that I feel represents the person I am photographing the most. For now I have done some very basic tester shots of my room at University to get me going and see how I can go about starting to get a collection of bedroom photographs. Let me know what you think!

Click on image to enlarge









Friday 11 February 2011

Adele

A different type of post to my usual ones but I just had to mention Adele's new album 21. There are very few albums out there where I love nearly every song but Adele's comes close. I have put all bar one song onto my iPod, one of very few albums that this has happened to! I wasn't a big Adele fan to begin with but after hearing her single 'Rolling in the Deep' and reading such great reviews I decided to give it a chance and man am I glad I did. So to everyone out there, go out and buy it, you won't regret it! Best album since Gorillaz's 'Plastic Beach' (plus it's a very beautiful album cover.)

Monday 7 February 2011

Primitive

I finally scanned in my primitive project images onto my computer so thought I would share them with you all. For my project I found old postcards from various cities like Paris, London, Bournemouth and Brighton. I then went to the places on the postcard and re-photographed how it looked now. Most of the original images were taken a hundred years ago and it was really fascinating to see how much had changed and how much had stayed the same. I tried to use landmarks so people would recognise them, and what had changed around it. In the darkroom I combined the two images together to create the mixture of old and new. The original postcard has come out as a negative over my image which makes the old look very ghostly, which I loved, especially if people were pictured. I then made them into my own postcards.

I really loved this project and has to be my favourite that I have done so far. Since doing the project I have begun to collect old postcards from places I visit, I especially love to find ones that people have written on and now have quite an impressive collection. I hope you like my postcard versions though. Let me know!

Click on image to enlarge

Bournemouth










London








Paris








Brighton