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.

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!

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