After meeting Tom Pope for the first time, he challenged us with the theme ‘Chance, Challenge, Change’ to see how we could interrupt this concept into our photography. He talked to us at the societe jersiaise where he spoke this how his brain works in his photography and gave us an idea on what new type of photography we should try. Taking a chance in photography is risky as you have to cover aspects of what the meaning behind the photo is and how your audience with react to it, positively or negatively. The challenge aspect is ultimately challenging yourself as a photographer and seeing how you cope with the work you are producing by trying something new and perhaps something you’re not comfortable with. I view the change aspect as manipulating your ideas and environment to capture the best outcome that you possibly could.
Tom gave me Clarence L Ouless to research on the archive to see what I thought of his work. His work mainly focuses on individual, family and group photographs from the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s. His photographs are good quality for the time period that these were taken, and would have been a popular photographer. However, these images don’t appeal to me as they aren’t the style that I would usually be interested in. I like the vintage look to them though and I do like black and white pictures, even though there were no options for coloured photographs until much later on I like the set up and imagery. They are staged photographs but I can still the emotional relationships between the people in the photographs which is what I want to express in my photographs. In my opinion, his photographs are successful in meeting the demands for family and individual portraits but not for anything more.