William Eggleston
working with colour film and using the dye transfer to saturate his image's eggleston capture the colour and style of the time beautifully, documenting life around him his concepts are ones which i find relate to mine.
Stephen Shore
Travelling across america with a large format camera shore's photographs are ones i don't feel have as much of a zeitgeist to them yet i still feel they are wonderful examples of colour photography.
Gregory Crewdson
Crewdsons constructed photographs of america are ones i find mesmerising in there detail and narrative.they look like film stills and make the veiwer feel smaller. however i beleive Crewdson is more about the visual than concepts and for this reason i don't enjoy his work as much as i could, also the way they are so highly constructed puts me off them a bit aswell.
Richard Billingham
Billingham is a photographer i greatly admire, with little understanding behind the workings of his camera he is able to capture moments in a more unique way than other photographers. his photographs documenting his father are ones which are harsh yet beautiful catching a life misunderstood and shunned by society and everything around the life, including the color.
The idea for my project is to document the way somebody lives, much in the same way Richard Billingham has, yet i won't photograph the person who lives like this. The end result will hopefully allow people to build up a picture of the person who lives this way. I like the idea of being able to take a portrait of a person without the person being in it.
My veiw of the way i want the photogrpahs to look is quite simple, i want desaturation in the colours acheived by using the expired film due to its grainy quality. i also want the compisition to seem imediate to give the sense of someones eyesight. i will try to cut things in half at the edges aswell to get a sense of periphery. i will shoot everything from my own eyeline to further the idea of vision. hopefully by using these techniques i will be able to acheive images which look like eyesight with fading vision giving more strenght to my idea as i plan to shoot the images at my grandmothers house and eyesight is one of the things she struggles with the most.
i went to my grandmothers house and photograhed her house, i was careful not to touch anything, to photograph it exactly as it was. i feel the idea of building up a picture of the person without photographing them was successful. what i didn't expect was the contrast between old and new, the 50's decor clashing with nhs standard comode railings. this coupled with my expired film and colour darkroom practice lead to a series of images depicting the idea of age and fading away which i am very pleased with.
the most important part for me was that these photo's should be as diplomatic and unbiased as possinble, i didn't want to photograph in a way that showed then as either bad or good, simply what they are. i wanted the way you see it to give you an understanding on how you see the object and setting rather than my veiw of it.
i have produced three final images for this project, each one with a main colour that takes it over.
the first is the one dominated by yellow, it depicts a toilet and bath, the bath has a modern dissability chair to aid you with washing. i took two shots of this. one with flash and one without, i chose to print the one without after selecting the other images i wanted to print, none of these had flah and i didn't want one to stand out more than the others. apart from the modern chair in the bath the bathroom was as i remembered it as a child, i was very careful not to make any changes to the room because of this the print is exactly as it would have been years ago, apart from the intrusion of the chair in the bath tub. i feel that the eyesight angle i used with this shot really gave it the sense of immediacy i wanted from all the images.
The second image i produced was a shot of the downstairs bathroom, with this the dominant colour is pink. there is a curtain running through the center of the image. on one side of this curtain there is brightness, on the other the room turns dark. i can't help but feel this sums up the nature of the house, once you remove the veil there is a dark exsistence to be seen. as with the others i made sure not to change any part of the room, and with this room more than any there remains no change, it is the same as i remember it as a small child.
the last image is dominated by green it relates to the first by being a downward eye shot, it is of the kitchen an shows a cooker and preparation area. again there is a general theme of aged furnishings which is then set asqew by the modern electric cooker. there is an empty used pan on the cooker which for me surgest the sense of a person lining here yet cooking for one. as with the others i didn't change any part of the room and the print is completely faithful to the real life within the home.
i beleive out of all the artists i have looked at for this project i have been most inspired both, conceptually and aesthetically, by richard billingham. his idea of documenting a figure of his family was one that i found quite moving and got me thinking about the people close to me that would make interesting subjects to document.
If i chose to carry the project on i would do so by spending allot more time at my grandma's house, studying and photographing the slight changes occuring and try and build up a bigger and less diluted version of the way she lives.
