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This is the presentation I delivered to the rest of my class to summarise my final images and concept. I received a positive response from my classmates which made me feel really pleased and reassured. It was also interesting to hear which images they liked most. A photo that was highlighted as a favourite due to its visually pleasing composition, was the one that captures the back of my mum with her two passport photos on the right. This photo is also one of my favourites, so I’m glad translates as a strong image to other people as well. Additionally, I was very nervous to give this presentation as I don’t do well with public speaking. I prepared bullet pointed notes and during the presentation I used various techniques and strategies to help settle my anxiety. I’m actually really proud of how it went and although it wasn’t perfect, I managed to get through it. I knew this course would help me to develop my photography skills and technical abilities, but I didn't expect for it to also strengthen my confidence, which I find truly valuable.

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I then researched sequencing inspiration and started to experiment with different layouts. This first idea was formed after thinking about how I would like my series to be presented within a photo book. I grouped the three passport photos together as a way to symbolise the beginning of my project, much like how you would physically begin a journey. I then arranged the rest of the photos chronologically referring to the date of the vernacular photos. For example, the second page is in the formation of a triangle, representing the bond between my mum and her family, friends and home in Liberia. The fourth page then displays the next chapter of her life in England, I positioned the photos leading upwards to mimic her progression through significant life events.

Although I think this sequencing is interesting, I don’t think it demonstrates my concept effectively. Additionally, for my final presentation I need to consider how my photos would look displayed on a wall. With this in mind, my next steps will involve developing my ideas and formulating a better arrangement for my series.

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Digital Shift

This series explores the power that digital media has had over the way people interact with vernacular photography and how the introduction of social media has challenged its etymology across different generations.

For my mother’s generation, vernacular photography was used in its traditional sense, to capture the everyday without artistic intention. She photographed with the purpose of personal documentation, purely for her own memories. In contrast, my generation has a different relationship with this form of photography due to new digital mediums. The vernacular image is now produced with intentions of posting to social media, spaces that can be regarded as artistic platforms, staged and curated by the individual. In that sense, it is rare to see any unintentional photos displayed online and therefore challenges the original meaning of the word vernacular.

I wanted to highlight this shift by presenting my mum’s relationship to her old vernacular photos within the context of artistic intention, emulating the way images are captured today. The deliberate positioning of her old photos within my own images, obscures her face to mirror the way in which we use our photographs on social media to purposefully show and conceal certain aspects of our identities online.

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After a lot of rearranging, I’m happy to submit this layout as my final sequence. After the previous idea I had, I was worried my images might not imply the theme of social media without context, so I wanted to strengthen this aspect through their sequencing. I thought a clear way to do this would be to arrange the images in a format similar to an Instagram profile. I aligned my photos in three vertical rows, purposefully leaving empty spaces to signify the idea that people don’t display every aspect of their life, they select which areas they want to document publicly. Additionally, I kept an aspect of my original idea and positioned my photos along a chronological timeline. However, with this layout I adopted Instagram’s structure and worked with a reverse chronological order, the only exceptions being the first and last photo. I wanted the first photo to establish my mum as the subject within my series, and the last image is a collage of my mum with negatives she developed from her own film camera. I thought this might make an effective concluding image to summarise my concept: she looks to be displaying her vernacular negatives within the image, and this image is positioned within an Instagram-like grid for an artistic purpose. I think this image works within itself to support my concept and therefore creates a strong impact as the final photo. Overall, I think this sequence is very effective at emphasising the way in which I have taken the subjective quality of both my mum and her old photographs, and positioned them from an objective perspective within my project.

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Before beginning this project, I had never taken photos to critically explore a brief or respond to contemporary issues, I had only used photography as a means to document or create visually interesting images with no deeper meaning. I therefore found this process challenging at times, but I enjoyed the experience and it allowed me to grow and develop as a photographer which was extremely rewarding.

After looking back at my project as a whole, I feel as though my images became slightly stronger with each shoot. The first few shoots are my least favourite, most of the photos seem to lack impact aesthetically, this might be because I was a little out of practice and needed time to improve. But it could also be because I prefer portrait and editorial photography, and therefore felt more passionate in the final shoots than I did in the first few.

All that being said, I'm happy with the outcome of my final images and I'm proud of what I managed to produce under the current limitations. I was worried I would struggle during this project, but instead, being restricted to my home environment forced me to think creatively for my work. It encouraged me to experiment with different technical skills and editing techniques that I might not have tried otherwise. I particularly enjoyed manipulating my images, and although I didn’t end up using them for my final selection, I’d love to develop this approach in the future. Perhaps creating a physical glitch with this method in order to critique another aspect of social media.

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After looking over my project, my favourite photos were from my fourth shoot. At this point I returned back to my original concept for the brief and decided my images responded to a different critique of social media. I decided to develop my response to ‘objectivity, subjectivity and power’ to reflect my final photos more accurately. My finalised concept to this brief is as follows:

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Most of Rosanna Jones’ portfolio reflects an element of fashion photography, but she combines this with an artistic nature to create her mixed media images. She uses techniques such as painting, ripping and bleaching to distress her photographs in order to explore their physical possibilities. She likes to express themes of embodiment and visual identity in her collections, particularly relating her work to the exploitation of women in fashion photography. She uses her manipulation techniques to deconstruct her subject’s faces and the ideas of perfection associated with their physical form. Additionally, she implements these distressing techniques in an aggressive manner to mimic how the camera has the ability to create a similar violence.

I really connect to Jones’ concept and love her experimental approach towards photography and how this pushes her images past their original, flat form. One of my favourite images is of the fragmented woman. The shapes of the smaller cuttings remind me of shards from a broken mirror. Perhaps suggesting ideas around people's perceptions of beauty and how you might view yourself in the mirror, but never see the true reflection of yourself, only a distorted and broken version linking to society's unachievable goals of beauty and perfection. I also think the close crop emphasises a feeling of intimacy, this is further strengthened by the direct eye contact from the model. The viewer is given a direct emotional connection to the women with no further form of context and understands a feeling of struggle or despair from the fragmented pieces and her facial expression. I think this technique is very effective and implementing this within my own work could be useful to establish similar emotional connections.

https://www.rosannajones.co.uk/

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I really like the technique of manipulating images and I thought attempting this approach might be a good way to incorporate my previous shoots together. Additionally, merging the objective photos of my mum’s items with the portrait shots of her would allow the viewer to establish emotional connections between the two subject matters through a singular image. To begin, I took a few portraits of my mum against a white back drop to mirror the style of shoot three, I hoped that doing so would create a more seamless editing process. I also wanted to try both digital and physical editing methods to see which would have the most effective outcome. I first used Photoshop to combine the portraits and object photos and experimented with different styles. With each image I tried to align the objects to suit the general flow or follow similar lines of the portrait shots to ensure a somewhat pleasing visual with the two different subject matters. For example, I like the striped montage of my mum and her jewellery and I’m pleased with how well the necklaces and earrings match up with her glasses and overall shape of her face. Additionally, I think the image of my mum and her scarf is very effective due to the scaling and positioning of the scarf to mimic where she would naturally wear it. I found that digitally manipulating my images provided a more versatile editing experience due to the easy adjustments, and I struggled without this flexibility when hand editing. However, I actually prefer the outcome of my hand edited images because I feel that the hand made aspect allows for a more subjective and emotional connection to the photos. I really like the fragmented image of my mum, but I don’t think it achieves my desired outcome as it is difficult to see the object photo behind, however I love the overall visual it creates and it would be fun to experiment with this style of manipulation in future projects. I think the least successful of the hand made photos is the one of my mum with both her hands surrounding the line-work map. I like the direction the image is taking, but I think I need to develop this idea because it could be difficult for the viewer to distinguish whether this image is collaged or whether she was actually holding the map in the photo. Overall I did enjoy montaging and manipulating my images but I think it’s a skill I would need to explore further in order to get a collection of images I truly love and present my concept clearly.

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F I N A L  S E L E C T I O N S  A N D  S E Q U E N C I N G  I D E A S

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F I N A L  S E L E C T I O N S  A N D  S E Q U E N C I N G  I D E A S

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For this shoot I wanted to use portraiture to explore the idea of never truly knowing someone. I thought that concealing my mum’s face with photographs from my previous shoots would further this sense of mystery around who she really is, while also linking my photographs together. In contrast, I also wanted this shoot to touch on the pressure from social media to share every detail of our lives. To do this, I looked through old photo albums and scrapbooks to find images and documents from my mum’s past. I thought including these images would represent this social pressure by presenting aspects of her life that wouldn’t usually be seen from beyond the pages of her photo albums.

I took two sets of photos, the first captured my mum physically holding the old photos and the other captured only her, so I could overlay the old photos on top in Photoshop. I wanted to see how each approach could impact the understanding of the final image and how they might create deeper links between not only my mum and her relationship to the old image, but how the viewer establishes an emotional connection to the photographs. I thought carefully about which old photos to use and their position within the frame while also considering how this might relate to my mums poses and/or environment.

When selecting the final images, I tried to include both contrasting and complimentary imagery between the old photos and my mum. For example, I think the photo showing the back of my mum, with the old pair of passport photos next to her seems quite complimentary. To me, it’s as though we are seeing her taking these passport photos within the image, she is facing away and the old photo is showing the view from the other side from a different time, it’s like we are seeing another dimension within this two-dimensional image. On the other hand, the photograph of my mum’s profile with an old image of her with her mum and brother outside the supermarket, could be seen as contrasting. My mum is alone in her home with a sparse, plain backdrop, while the older image is depicting a scene of family within a social setting. One image that I think combines both complimentary and contrasting elements is of my mum leaning sideways with the older photo of her home in Libera placed over the top. The landscape outline leads up into the path of her shoulder, suggesting a strong connection between her and the image, but the juxtaposition of the nature against her British home sparks interest.

After completing this shoot and looking at the images, I do prefer those that contain old photos from the photo albums over those containing my previous shoots. This was not my intention and I originally wanted more containing my previous shoots, but I think during editing I realised the older photos suggested more of a narrative and seemed to fit better with the images I’d captured of my mum. On the right are three examples of this. They contain images from previous shoots which I feel don’t work as well due to a disconnect between the object/environment and my mum. The other three incorporate old photos which I do believe contain interesting imagery, but ultimately they aren't as visually pleasing as the photos on the left.

Additionally, a larger amount of the images I found successful are from the set edited in Photoshop. Although I do feel that the images of my mum physically holding a photo suggest more of a physical connection, I found that I had a lot more freedom to establish a visual connection between my mum and the old image in Photoshop due to the editing process.

Overall I’m really happy with the outcome and I do think these images provide the strong impact I’d hoped for. However, because I couldn’t successfully incorporate a lot of my previous work in this series, I want to try other methods of doing this in my next shoot.

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Most of Zeng’s work reflects a fashion and editorial style when she captures her portraits. She tries to express elements of emotion and yearning within her work, which is definitely present in the images I have chosen here. I love that her portfolio contains different styles of portraiture with her models engaging in various poses, I think this will be very inspiring when I take photos of my mum in future shoots. I think the staged nature of her portraits will also be an effective way to reflect my concept in regard to how people stage their own photos for social media.

In particular I really like the photo of the women in a green outfit. Due to the low cut of her dress, it could be easy to associate this with societal ideas surrounding scandal and therefore sexualisation, however with this photo I don’t see those connotations. The model seems to have agency within the image, she appears confident in her posture and identity. I think this is further strengthened by the photographer also being a women, which has reduced the appeasement of the ‘the male gaze’. She is not being displayed to be ‘looked at’, she is embracing her own narrative and seems to have control over her actions and sense of self. I think this is interesting considering it is a staged image, but I think the technical aspects of this photos make it seem more natural. The use of flash makes it seem as though the image has been caught in motion. Combining this with the choice of clothing and jewellery, which could express ideas of wealth and sophistication, this model looks as though she has been caught backstage before an event or catwalk. The close cropping also gives a sense of intrigue, encouraging the viewer to wonder what she is looking at and what lies beyond the frame.

https://www.haozeng.com/

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These photographs are from multiple series created by John Stezaker. In his work he uses a variety of found images taken from postcards, film stills, commercial photographs and book illustrations, usually dating from before he was born in 1949, to create collages. He gives these old images new meanings through juxtaposition and manipulation. I really love his work, particularly how this technique encourages the viewer to look closer at the images due to their abstract nature. It allows the viewer to notice elements within the photo which might not have been recognised at a first glance. For example, when I first looked at the photo of the bridge covering the older man, I only considered the instant juxtaposition of nature against a person. It was only after looking further did I notice the clever placement of the bridge within this image. The arches in the bridge are positioned where the man’s eyes should be and the shadows in the water follow the line of his face, additionally the bricks seem to mimic his wrinkled skin. This combination presents a ghostly impression of a face and could provoke feelings of unease, feelings not generally associated with the two images separately. I think this approach to image making could be useful to convey ideas around identity in my project. I think it would be worth exploring this technique, perhaps taking photos from my previous shoots and collaging them with other photos of my mum to introduce new connections and meanings.

https://www.saatchigallery.com/artist/john_stezaker

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This shoot was heavily inspired by the previously mentioned work of Taryn Simon. I wanted to objectively capture objects owned by my mum to reflect the different aspects of her identity. I think this kind of photography would generally call for a professional studio, but the current circumstances has made that unobtainable. I therefore had to try recreate one of those spaces with what I had to hand. I researched how to create a DIY setup for product photography in order to make it as professional as possible, but I still struggled with the lighting and ended up attempting this shoot twice.

I don’t own a lot of adjustable, small lamps, so I knew I’d need to use sunlight as my primary light source. My first attempt was on a very sunny day and the direct sunlight produced harsh shadows which wasn’t my desired outcome. I tried to diffuse the light by sticking white paper to the window, but this made the room too dark. For my second attempt, I chose an overcast day to ensure softer lighting and added smaller lamps to produce even more light and remove as many shadows as possible. As ‘The Set Up’ shot to the right shows, I also managed to find a white table cloth and position it into a curved shape. My research suggested that this was an effective way to make the background look seamless and allows the light to bounce back onto the object.

I tried to position the objects aesthetically and took photos using my tripod to ensure continuity. As the ‘Before and After Shots’ to the right show, the original photo had some issues. My room and table cloth weren’t wide enough to provide a full white background, and the fabric has multiple wrinkles throughout. I opened the images in Photoshop and used the clone stamp to remove the unwanted background and wrinkles. Additionally, I thought some of the bigger objects filled too much of the frame so I researched how to alter this. I ended up using the crop tool to enlarge the photos and ticked the 'content-aware' box to extend the white background seamlessly.

When presenting these photos, I chose to group them into small categories supporting a grid-like formation. The first row being articles worn by my mum, the second row being objects relating to her hobbies, the third row being items she uses daily and the fourth being decorative pieces.

The final outcome of this shoot does achieve what I’d initially aimed for, but I’m not sure if I like how blended the white background looks. I feel like the enhanced and perfected quality of the background borders on looking too fake, and therefore could deter from the objective nature I wanted these images to have. That being said, I definitely prefer it to the wrinkles which I think would be slightly distracting, but I think next time I would use a large piece of white card to avoid these issues.

Moving forward, I think it could be effective to take portraits of my mum and contrast those more subjective shots with these objective images. It could be interesting to see how I could experiment with this idea and also incorporate all the shoots taken so far with portraiture.