As the idea i’ve already come up with will focus more on places than people, I think I am also going to have a look at some old photos my family have. When we had the Archive competition, one thing I noticed was that there are a lot of similarities between me and my mum when she was younger, we both used to do dancing, and we both look quite similar. I also noticed that my Aunt, when she was younger, looks quite a bit like her son, and so I may to have a look at this.

I’m going to have a look at the old photo albums my Nan gave us and look at some old photos of me and see if there would be anything I would be able to do with them.

“Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism (the collecting, editing, and presenting of news material for publication or broadcast) that employs images in order to tell a news story.”

Photojournalism  is separated by ethical idea behind the photos, in that they should be both honest and impartial whilst telling the story in strictly journalistic terms.

Photojournalism images have meaning to do with recent events. The situation implied by the images is usually fair and accurately represents the event(s) being shown. They are normally paired with other bits of information (a news article) to help make facts more relatable to the viewer.

When photojournalistic photos were originally printed in news papers, they were used more to enhance the text, rather than to be a medium of information. The first weekly newspaper to be illustrated with images was the Illustrated London News, which was first printed in 1842.

I want to explore accidental and purposeful gatherings within my work, and how buildings and places create the right environments for these different gatherings.

First I want to think about what kind of places people accidentally gather in in Jersey. Places where lots of people go at the same time, but not intentionally. For example at a bus station lots of people go there to get buses, but not everyone is there to catch the exact same bus. Compared to a concert, where people all buy tickets to go see the same thing at the exact same time.

Accidental Gatherings.

• Bus Station
• Beaches
• Liberation Square
• Royal Square
• Millenium Park
• Millbrook Park
• Elephant Park
• Restaurants
• Cafes
• Town
• Fort Regent
• Les Quennevais Sports Centre
• Dual Carriageway
• Supermarkets

Its quite a difficult time of the year for looking at Purposeful gatherings, because most of the Purposeful gatherings have already happened during Summer. E.g. Jersey live, Jersey Pride, Groove de Lecq etc.

Purposeful Gatherings

• School/Work
• Assemblies
• Lunch Times (within school)
• Ticketed events (Concerts/festivals/comedy shows)
• Organised classes/activities/clubs
• Organised events (weddings/parties etc)
• Churches/religious places
• Organised Family gatherings

Places that can be considered both Accidental and Purposeful gatherings

• Planes/Ferries
• Cinema
• Viewing Rugby/Football club

It is slightly difficult to define exactly what is a purposeful gathering and an accidental gathering.

Even within accidental gatherings there will be smaller purposeful gatherings. For example when a small group of friends arrange to meet in a park, but there are other people there who they didn’t organise to meet with.

Also within Purposeful gatherings there can be accidental gatherings. E.g. When people buy tickets to a specific event, they know that other people will be there seeing the same thing at the same time, but they don’t know exactly who the people there are going to be, and so may bump into people they know (because this is Jersey and Jersey is small and you will always bump into people you know).

Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer. He has had around 40 solo photobooks published, and has featured in around 80 exhibitions worldwide.

“He is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.”

His work caught my eye as some of the photos he has taken are a similar kind of style to what I would like to do with my project. Although this is not the focus of his photography, some of his photos show places where people have gathered for some reason, which interests me a lot.

Some of the photos show places where the people are all there for their own separate needs. For example, the Diamond Hill Cemetery, as shown above, and the Ferry below. These people are here by themselves, but they are all their for similar reasons.

Then there are places where something has been organised, so people are purposely all gathered in that place for the same thing.

This is the kind of thing I would like to explore within my work, places people accidentally gather, and places people purposely gather for specific purposes and events.

“Martin goes to Benidorm and explores further what is possible with the telephoto lens.”

“Over the summers of 2013 and 2014, Martin explored life on the Amalfi Coast, Italy.”

“Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle both significant and relevant to history and historical events and everyday life.”

There are many similar branches of  documentary photography such as social documentary photography, street photography, celebrity photography and photojournalism, however Documentary photography tends to follow a single topic or story in-depth over time, as opposed to photojournalism’s real-time coverage of breaking news and events. Documentary photography can capture and sustain public attention, and inform people about pressing social and human rights issues.

There are some photos which stand out as having made a difference in the world by showing the truth to people in a shocking way to make them change how they view certain situations.

The most recent and obvious example of this is being the photos of the Syrian Child, Aylan Kurdi, whose body was captured washed up on a Turkish beach. These photos have helped to shock people into seeing how extreme the current migrant crisis is and has made a lot of people realise that more needs to be done to help these people.

Another example being this photo of Marcy Borders which was taken as she was fleeing the World Trade Centre in the 9/11 disaster. This wan’t so much shocking people to realise they needed to do something more about a situation, but shocked them into seeing what it must have been like being in the buildings.

The title of our next topic is Faith Family and Community.

These titles are very interesting because they can be linked together in different ways.

Community is the widest of the three words, as both Faith and Family can be interpreted as being communities.

Faith can be something you’re brought into because of your Family and from having been to church when I was younger a lot, there was a very strong community of people who all knew each other and all had something in common.

Family is a different type of community in that most of the time you don’t get to choose to be in it.

Some people don’t have a normal sense of family community, for example, people who have to go through Foster care because they have lost the family they were born into or because their Family community isn’t accepting of them; However some of these people find new Families, who they choose, and who choose them, and some manage to find community within a family of others who are in the same position as them;

And for some Families, like in some Portuguese and Italian families, the community that their family holds is one of the most important things to them, and they celebrate having big families.

One thing which I am going to explore with this project is the buildings and places that bring these three things, Faith, Family and Community together. Faiths have religious places in which they congregate, Families have certain places where they may go every year as a tradition, or somewhere they see each other often. All together I think I will look at the places that bring Communities together, and look at the different kinds of communities there are.

The photos which I will be collecting have to contain these things:

• Either are places with lots of people gathered, or where people would normally gather (e.g. a church on a Sunday or a church when its empty)
• Can be places with strong Faith/Family/Community connections or without. (e.g. a church, where everyone is of the same faith vs a Plane, where people are all gathered together, but not necessarily of the same faith/family/community)