Interim review

The Object

Our first brief being 'The object', where we had to make a still life image within the studio. This had to be shot using a large format camera and colour film.

When walking around Chatham I saw a lot of people smoking and drinking and wanted to try and represent this visually somehow. The more I looked for this and how to represent it the more I started noticing that a lot of these people were pregnant women, so I decided to look into the effects these two things would have on an unborn child.

I wanted to create an image that had to be viewed rather than just glanced at, like Keith Arnatts 'Pictures from a Rubbish Tip'. These were images of rubbish that looked very beautiful in the way they were shot yet they were created from discarded items.

In my final image I wanted to get across the idea of a poor defenceless child stripped of its innocence due to the parents alcoholism. The image shows a doll left in a room alone with the door slightly ajar. The effects of the Foetal Alcohol Syndrome are a small head, smaller eyes, underdeveloped jaw and flat midface. I couldn't transform the doll to this extent as it was not very malleable, so instead I cut away some of its head and created an explosion of cans to show the damage this syndrome causes. I chose to photograph the doll on a play mat rather than a plain white backdrop as it puts the doll in a normal environment causing it to look more sinister with the alcohol cans.

I also decided that I only wanted to show the effects of the alcohol instead of doing the smoking as well. This is because the effects of smoking on an unborn child are more internal than the alcohol effects.

Overall I am quite pleased with the image, even though it is not a literal representation I think it still gets the point across that alcohol is very damaging to unborn children.


The Environment

For the Environment project we had to choose an image to pastiche and then also make work based on our personal conceptual approach to representing the landscape.

 I chose to pastiche Robert Adams 'On Signal Hill'. I managed to find a single tree upon a hill on an overcast day. My pastiche is quite similar and although I am pleased with it as a first attempt, I would like to explore a bit further along from where I was to find two trees together and also capture the image when the light is more on the landscape in the distance, similar to how it is on the town in the original.

My own work was about looking at a metaphorical journey of life, so I looked at photographers such as Nicholas Hughes and Paul Hill. I tried to combine the two influences together to form a comprehensive yet sublime series of images. The main thing that I feel I have learnt from looking into Nicholas Hughes is that Landscape photography can be pushed and doesn't have to be a crisp clear image.

When making this series I kept thinking about my own route through life over the last four or five years as I was stuck in a crappy job heading nowhere which is why the first image is very dark with the path disappearing into the woods, then I was introduced into photography which basically lit up my path, the last image has several different crossroads which is where I felt I was about six months ago at the end of college.

I spent some time in the darkroom experimenting with grades and times to make these images but feel that if I had planned my time better I would have been able to experiment a lot more and would have had some different images to show.