Simryn Gill's 'Dalam' - the inspiration for my bedroom project.

I saw Simryn Gill’s series ‘Dalam’ exhibited in the Tate Modern, where the images covered an entire room, top to bottom with brightly coloured rooms. When I researched more into what the project was about I became fascinated with the idea. She travelled around Dalam and photographed stranger’s front rooms. What I love about the images is how they really display a culture completely different from ours, especially as the country she was in is very religious. Each room was brightly coloured and full of beautiful artefacts and give a window into the lives of these unknown people. It is Gill’s project that has really inspired my idea. Unlike the area that Gill photographed, I don’t think England has a strong easily recognised culture and we aren’t very religious anymore and therefore to me these types of front rooms don’t exist anymore, many houses don’t even really have a front room. Therefore I decided to photograph bedrooms because to me bedrooms are an important space to people, very personal and private. I know that when I visit someone news’, house I always like to snoop around in their bedroom as it really shows a lot about the person. Therefore using Gill’s idea I am going to adapt it to photograph different bedrooms. I really like how she uses the same format for every picture which is something I need to experiment with and decide how to photograph the bedrooms as I would like them to all be the same format as well. I love how vibrant her images are and hope my images have the same bright, homely feel to them. She used natural lighting to create her images which I too will be focusing on, or possibly include a camera flash as well, just to get an even light for the whole bedroom, again this is something to experiment with in my first shoot. Although Gill’s work is mainly about culture whereas mine will be about the individual it still does relate to what I feel is a lack of culture here in England. Gill focuses on capturing a space that even though is private, as it is someone’s home, it is one of the most public rooms, that guests will see and therefore it is clear that these people have put a lot of time into making a room they can show off with pride whilst still keeping it personal to themselves. I was really amazed by the hundreds of rooms pictured in the one exhibition room and feel that a similar idea would work well in book format.