‘Square mile’ final submission

I began this assignment by brain storming my local area which has been my home for almost all of my life. It was interesting to try to see it through new eyes as I have become very oblivious to the area over time. I was drawn to exploring my childhood areas but I was also drawn to the river, both of which overlap at times as much of my childhood was also spent by the river. I decided to head out and shoot the areas I was drawn to.

It was like a Pandora’s box, opening up old memories, mostly pleasant, and rediscovering areas that I thought no longer existed as well as finding out some areas were no longer there.

I looked at the work of various photographers but was particularly drawn to Jodi Taylors’s work as it was of a similar subject to my own initial ideas and I also liked the addition of text by Barnard. As I was ploughing through my reading list I discovered Anna Fox and her Basingstoke series which interested me as she also added captions and her images are quite saturated, which leads me to the exhibition I visited of William Eggleston’s work and the fact that I was also drawn to his more saturated images. I had been toying with the idea of aging my childhood images by using cream tone black and white but in the final edit I decided to increase the colour saturation instead.

I have very limited ‘technical’ skill so I was a little daunted after seeing the high calibre of work by other students so this caused me to overthink this assignment slightly. I used a Nikon D3200 set to manual mode and a combination of lenses (Nikon 18-300mm, Nikon 35mm Prime and Sigma 10-20mm). I had limited opportunities to shoot so in future I would like to plan to make better use of natural lighting.

Perhaps the addition of a tripod may have improved the quality of some of the images however given my shyness I did not want to draw attention to myself, I am aware that my photographs are devoid of people, this is something I would like to work on in future but for the purpose of this brief it was more about my memories than the inclusion of other people.

I particularly like my alleyway photograph with the hopscotch, I was always up and down this alley in my childhood, and I also like that some of the photos had the pylons in the background which run through the town. I remember being terrified of the pylons after seeing the graphic safety video adverts as a child, a video of a boy with a kite springs to mind.

If I were to revisit this I think that I would like to add more childhood elements and stage some of the images to make them stronger. Overall I am quite pleased with my final selections and I look forward to building on this.

I have in fact ended up with Two Collections : Childhood and The River, so I have included both final selections for each collection.

Contacts sheets: