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

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.)

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

'In five years time where will you be....' - Well hopefully making images like Carlos Arroyo Galaxia

With two new projects beginning and a New Years Resolution not to leave work to the last minute, I have gained the excitement back for my course that I lost thanks to the 'Contemporary Technologies' project... finally I get to photograph my own images again and this time decide my own brief, be in control of EXACTLY what I want to do. However, the daunting thing is, what is it that I exactly want to do? At 20 I feel that life is still an open book and I am young enough to not know, but in reality I finish university in just over a year and then am thrown into the big bad world. With my 'Negotiated Practices' project, my tutor has asked us all to fill in a form all about where we see ourselves in 5 years time. Well for me, hopefully as a successful band reportage or editorial photographer but in the current climate it's more likely I'll be alone, jobless and penniless with a very nice camera to keep me company.

Therefore in light of this what am I doing, where am I going melltdown, I decided to actually do something about what I want to do and really start researching into well, photography, so that my next two projects will be all about me, my style, what I like and what I want to create. I have started to think about doing more work experience (the last couple of days I have spent with fashion photographer Victor de Mello, assisting his shoot for the Sunday Times Style Magazine) as well as really researching into photographers and I happened to stumble across the beautiful work of Carlos Arroyo Galaxia in 'Dazed and Confused'. He is a Spanish born photographer who captures his subjects with 35mm film focusing on the space of others, both happy and melancholy. His new project 'I Wish You Were Me' shows almost an obsession with bedrooms and how they relate to people, something that I have been looking into doing for my 'Photographic Bookwork' project as people's bedrooms have always been an interest to me and therefore his work really fascinated me.

For now I leave you with some of my favourite shots from his new project and hope you love them as much as I do!

Pop Art Take 2

So here I am, still struggling with my Contemporary Technologies project (surprise, surprise) and trying to create my own Pop Art style, which is a lot harder than one would think. However, by combining the few influences I have researched and admire, such as Warhol, Julian Opie and "Waking Life" by Richard Linklater (a series head tripe) I feel that my own style has started to emerge. Here are a few of my first experiments that I am currently developing, take a look, let me know what you think and how you think I could develop it!

Click on image to enlarge.

Final Land Photograms

These are my final images for a Themes and Responses project that I just recently handed in. The edit consisted of 8 images that I felt worked in two different series as one set were very red and black whilst the other more orange and pink tones. The set up shown below is how I envisaged they would look on display. I tried doing large scale photograms within the land but to no luck, every single one of them came out black, however I am definitely still pleased with my final smaller ones and think they make a great series! I love their abstract shapes, the texture nature has created and the vibrant colours! So let me know what you think!?

Click on image to enlarge!

Nicholas Hughes

I am just in awe of Nicholas Hughes's work! Like me with my current project, Hughes is working with the art of camera-less photography, however he works with light pollution exposing the paper and his images are much less abstract than mine. His photographs are mysterious, often dark and eerie landscapes that one would be excused for mistaking as a painting and I just absolutely adore them. I hope you agree!