What is Home? This is a purely speculative as the idea of “Home” is different to different people. Some people find that home is where you simply live, others say it is where you feel comfortable. I personally see Home and a place of residency, however, I find it is minor objects of sentiment that make a home feel homely. So I decided the base mine around the individuality of the person in the home. I picked 3 objects of mine that have a certain level of sentiment to me, they make me feel comfortable and each one has a story behind it. I then asked a friend for 3 objects that meant a lot to them and had a story which helped make university feel like home for them. I chose items that everybody has in their house/flat/apartment, but the items are unique to me. I took a Still Life approach to this project as I thought that would work well for the purposes intended.

My Items

This is my tea holster. My mother bought my this because she knows of my love of Star Wars and of the character, R2-D2 at depicted. It was only meant as a gag gift.  It originally contained shower gel and a flannel however I removed these items and began using it to hold Earl Grey teabags. The reason I use it for Earl Grey tea specifically because my mother was the person who got me into drinking Earl Grey and now I have only ever drank Earl Grey ever since. This item holds a certain connection to my mother as explained and so it makes me feel more comfortable so many miles away from home.

I chose to take this in it’s natural environment as I thought this would work well with the story.

This is an old, army tin opener. It is small, versatile, easy to clean and cheap. I hold onto this because my step-father gave it to me. The story behind this object is fairly simple, When my Mum and step-father were having work done to the house, they couldn’t find a tin opener when I was helping make dinner, so my step-father went into the garage and grabbed this, a souvenir from his army days. I used it and was so fascinated by it and how simple of a device it was. He saw this amazement so gave me one to go to university with. Despite having a mechanical tin opener, I still enjoy using this from time to time. This has a sentimental attachment to my step-father and I because it reminds me of his sense of humour.

This item, this bell, holds more memory for me than any other object. It was originally owned by my grandmother. It is with 2 Hindu Statues but the Bell holds more importance. My and my Grandparents were always very close even from a young age and when my grandfather passed away, I helped my father look after my grandmother and we grew even closer through this connection. My Grandmother was a devout Hindu, nothing gave her as much strength as her religion and people always knew her by her religion. When she passed away 2 and a half years ago, out of respect, I ring this bell everyday in her memory.

Other People’s Items

This is a very sweet story about a friend of mine. He is very determined to join the Army in memory of his father in who gave him this patch from his first tour in Iraq 20 years ago. This is his way of remembering home and his father.

This is a coaster of a cow from a friend of mine from Milton Keynes. She told me she likes this because it reminds her of home. She informed me that Milton Keynes is famous for having Concrete Cows everywhere, and that there is a funny story about how another town miles away stole the cows and sprayed painted them which lead to a “Town War” and mentioned by the locals. This humour around such a random event helps her remember home and family.

This is a Card sent to my flatmate  by her mother. When coming to university from quite a distance, my flatmate was very apprehensive and nervous. To make her feel more comfortable and at home at university, her mother wrote her this card letting her know how proud of her her family is and how much she means to them. This made my flatmate ease into university life much easier.

For this part of the project, I thought I would follow the same idea as my previous Portraiture project in which I include the aspect of drugs. However, with these photos, they will not come across as literal as the previous project and I will show my subjects under the influence of alcohol instead of simply in possession of the substance. My main inspiration for this was a photographer name Nan Golding who would commonly take pictures of people whilst under the influence of alcohol, drugs. She liked to show “a self-absorbed, often revelatory world” (Hagan, 2014) says the Guardian writer Sean O’hagan who discusses how Nan Goldin’s photography impacted the world and showed the world in a light never before seen on picture(ibid).

Alcohol

This was an interesting portrait to take. Here you have a woman in Mcdonalds after having had a good night out. She was very vacant when I asked if I could take a picture of her but allowed me. When taking the image, I asked her to relax so she began leaning on her hand and I took a few pictures. She began looing off into the distance which I felt added a distracted look. The lighting in mcdonalds worked in my favour as it allowed me to just let the camera do all the work.

This was a very difficult picture to take. The subject seemed further intoxicated than the previous subject although he seemed almost excited at the prospect of having his picture taken. He was unable to stand still which caused a motion blur when taking the image. I asked him to smile but when he tried, he began feeling awkward and couldn’t stop smirking. This was taken in the lobby of Student housing which had ceiling and wall mounted lights, they gave a dimmer look than Mcdonalds. The framing I thought worked well in this however the wall mounted light was in shot more than I had anticipated and the subject had left before I noticed.

Portraiture is an art form that has been around since the very beginning of art. Statues in Ancient Rome, Statues of great men and women were made in their image in a very similar fashion. Artists have been painting portraits since the 1100s and ever since the invention of the  Still Camera, portrait has been adopted by the photography world since Robert Cornelius in 1839 took the world’s first portrait photograph ever made (Opam, 2011). Since then the world has been almost taken over by the concept of portraits whether it’s taken by a professional photographer or “A fast self-portrait, made with a smartphone’s camera”(Saltz, 2014) also known as a Selfie (Ibid).

For my Portraiture Project, I chose to give mine a specific theme. Mine was based around the use of Drugs, both legal and illegal.

For this image, I went to a student I saw having a casual cigarette on his break and asked if he wouldn’t mind me taking a picture of him smoking the cigarette. WHat I found interesting about this image is that the only direction I gave him was “Just act natural and look into the camera”, when taking the photo, he attempted to relax and accidentally looked very aggressive when I took the picture. We both agreed that the aggressive looking picture was a better choice than the others taken so decided to go along with this idea. The natural lighting for this image was directly shone onto him from the front, resulting in a slight washed out look to the subject as his clothing includes a white shirt which caused a lot of reflection.

I was originally going to have a picture taken with someone with a fake “joint”, a combination of Weed and Tobacco, however it was found to be far too difficult to make and then photograph and the Joints tend to look very similar to cigarettes so the message would not have been received as well. As a result of this, I decided to focus this on Smoking cigarettes as it is currently one of the leading drugs in the UK.  This subject was very reluctant to to have her picture but as a friend, she agreed. It should be mentioned that the subject had a habit of laughing whilst I was attempting to take the picture so I pretended to take the image and waited for the perfect moment.  I wanted to have a female with a cigarette in the next piece because the comparison between the male above and the female in this picture is very interesting. Having told them both to relax, this was the result. Please note the difference in posture, this woman is carefully upright whereas the male leans and relaxes. There are also many similarities such as the way they both hold the cigarette between the middle and index.

When taking this portrait, I walked up to a stranger in the street and asked them if they wouldn’t mind, this man accepted and so I continued to explain the purpose of this project and explained that I would need him to hold this bottle of Jack Daniel’s Sour Mash Whiskey as part of the alcohol aspect of my drugs project. When taking this photo, it was important to get the background out of focus but with the lens I had it was very difficult so  was only able to manage a slight soft focus on the background. The natural lighting was mostly being blocked by surrounding buildings giving a much more drowned out look of the colours surround thie subject, not to mention the subjects clothing matched the tones of his surrounding making a level of coherency very effective.

This was the only portrait that offered me any issues as it included the use of fake illegal substances so the approach of the request was vital to the success of taking the image. This image was based on Cocaine. This subject was very interested in this and looked forward to the picture after explaining the situation. I asked the subject to present the objects and if he was proud to be using it at which point I gave him a card to represent the cutting of Cocaine. The lighting for this image was fantastic as it was very sunny on the top of Steep Hill and the light reflected off the surroundings to give a nice, naturally hot temperature effect on the photo.

The Found Object movement is something that has been around for centuries since painters such as Pieter Claesz would take objects, place them in complementary settings such as a well lit table and would paint them out of their natural environment. This method has since been adopted by the photography world and has been used for advertisements such as perfume or food  and is often used as an art form such as when photographer and sculptor, Thomas Demand, creates a set or scene entirely of paper, photographs it and then destroys the set for example this office block is entirely paper. 

TripTych

Here is my example of a Triptych of Still Life photography. This was a part of a Found Object brief in which I was tasked with going to other student’s accommodation, borrowing an object and taking a still of of that object. When informed of this brief, I was asked not to take a picture of a beer can or miscellaneous bottle as that seemed too easy, so I took this as a challenge and chose to take pictures of 3 different bottles of alcohol but imbue 3 colours throughout the images. Choosing to stick with the primary colours, I filled each bottle with coloured water and made the background alternating colours to give a pattern to the triptych. I used a standard 18-50mm lens on a Canon 70D, I found that this lens was a little too large for the up close Still Life.

Appropriation is the act of taking another already existent piece of work, adapting it and using it as your own. It is a common method of putting across ideas on social ideas and situations. It’s use in photography is often to satirize either a company or create a whole new image with it’s own meaning. photographers have been using appropriation for decades including people such as Richard Prince who famously appropriated the image of the cowboy riding a horse on the Marlboro advert, and then sold it on. He has done this more recently by taking photos from Instragram, the photo posting site, and sells them on (Heisler, 2015). This has caused a lot of controversy and other photographers are beginning to hate him for it (Bailey, 2015). Groups are beginning to gather together and have started using appropriation to further their goals such as Adbusters who like to using advertisements to portray new meanings or reflect the corporation they’re “spoofing” such as can be seen at https://www.adbusters.org/spoofads.

Appropriation 1

Here is my first look into Appropriation. Here I have taken an image of a well loved cartoon rabbit and inserted it into a Rimmel London make-up poster in the place of Georgia May Jagger. I have done this as a way of portraying how this sense of the “London Look” can appear false to other people and how this model is fairly famous among the laymen for her recognisable teeth; the teeth is what inspired me to look into rabbits. This concept of “the way we’re meant to look” also leads to stereotypes which are common such as Americans believing British people have bad teeth and this leads onto a bad state of competitive advertising between the nations.

What inspired me into this piece was looking into Appropriation in Photography and find an incident when W Magazine released what they called “The Art Issue” in November 2010 and it had images of the Kardashian sisters naked with their only cover being the statements “It’s all about me, I mean you, I mean me” which lead me onto the comedic satire of celebrities.

Appropriation 2

Here is my second look into appropriation. Here I have taken the original Morrisons logo including the symbol and name, removed letters and changed the slogan to have the same ring but with a new meaning behind it. This resulted in an anti-capitalism statement about how large corporations don’t look to satisfy customers but only look at what profits them.

The inspiration for this image came from looking into Barbara Krugers work with old advertisements and making them her own personal message.

Appropriation 3

Here is my third and final piece of appropriation for this project. Here I have a group of soldiers on horse back riding off into battle. I have added the text “Our Soldier’s Plights” as a way of making the audience think about what our soldiers have to go through. This image was originally for the Lloyds 2015, 250 commemoration video of their logo’s horse going through dramatic events in history to show their own sense of solidarity. I tooks a screenshot of these soldiers and simply changed the meaning to fit the purpose I wanted the audience to think about instead.

What inspired me to take a satirical look into this form of appropriation is the images such as Barbara Kruger’s 1987 piece, “We Don’t Need Another hero” in which she took an image from advertisement, cropped it and added new text to give it a new meaning.

Heisler, Y. (2015) Meet the man who steals your Instagram photos and sells them for $90,000. Unknown: BGR. Available from http://bgr.com/2015/05/26/instagram-prints-photos-richard-prince-art/. [Accessed 03 December 2015].

Bailey, J. (2015) Why So Many Photographers Hate Richard Prince. Unknown: plagiarismtoday. Available from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/05/21/why-so-many-photographers-hate-richard-prince/ [Accessed 03 December 2015]