Wednesday 17th June 2015

Everyone who did photography in our school went to St. Malo for the day with Tom pope (Photographer), Gareth (Archivist at  Societe Jersiaise) and our 3 photography teachers. The aim of the trip was pretty self-guided with regards to what photographs and videos we took. We were all inspired by Tom Pope’s work of performance photography and decided that we all wanted to come up with ideas that was similar to Tom’s by doing some bizarre things in front of public to try and see what type of reactions we would get. I previously came up with some ideas that I could do such as powder paint throwing which I decided not to do in the end and passing out roses to strangers. On the boat to France me and my friends came up with a list of things to do in St. Malo which we could perform, such as acting out scenes from films, freeze frames in shops, slow motion, meditating in the middle of streets, pretending to throw heavy balls to each other and many other ideas. As a whole, the day really inspired me to carry on with these ideas in Jersey and present some videos for my finals. I took more videos than I did photos which is defiantly new to me but I did enjoy.

My first video was of Tom Pope’s idea of trying to stack cardboard boxes in the tallest tower that someone could make. The reaction was not all positive as we had a few members of the public looking at us in disgust and saying this, and then the bin man drove over one of our bags and took the cardboard away.  I found this idea good as it was simply but got a lot of public interaction which was the aim. Here is the video:

My idea is of handing out a rose to members of the public to see what they thought of it. Some of the people said no because they thought I was selling them but it was difficult to translate why I was giving them out as I can’t speak a lot of french.

The idea of slow motion in a supermarket was also to get people to look and be intrigued as to what we were doing, however, people were  avoiding the aisle we were in so that they avoided hassle. But it was still good for experiment.

We went on the round-a-bout in the children’s playground to video movement/something different and fun.

Tom pope’s idea was for someone to stack cardboard boxes as high as they can in 30 seconds.

Lastly, we went to a little park in St Malo and pretended that our inflatable volley ball was a really heavy weight and played throw and catch with it, really exaggerating it. This really got the audiences attention which isn’t fully shown in pictures and videos.