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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