For my first shoot i took images one morning before school of everyone in my house to show how normal life is in my house in the week. For these images i experimented using flash in some of the photos, which i think makes the images look amateurish which i think looks quite interesting. I followed my parents round to take these images, but for some of my other images i am going to try and take them when my family do not know i am taking the images. 

I took this portrait image of my mum as she was showing my that something was in her eye, my mum did not know i was taking this image and so it caught her by surprise. I like this image because of the angle that it is taken as it is a very close up image. 

I took this image of my mum when my mum was leaving to go to work. When i took this image i used flash, this image was a spontaneous image as i was just following my mum around the house and i took it as she was turning around. I think that the dull lighting in this image makes my subject stand out because of the motorbike jacket which has been lit up. In this image the main focus is the bike jacket which is important as this my mum needs to wear this on her bike to feel safe as she cannot take the car to work. 

Through these images my main focus from taking them was to document my mums life and to show on an ordinary mundane day what happens in her life. I focused on taking images of her but also taking other landscape images of my house and of other people in my family to show what their life is like with the effect of my mum. These images are ordinary family images which show a  routine of what happens in the morning in my house. I focused on taking images of my mum on her bike as this is what she takes to work, because of her anxiety she cannot take the car to work as she freaks out that she will not be able to get out of the situation.

Alec Soth is a photographer who was born in 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Alec’s photojournalist approaches to Westernized America shows short stories of people who has been described as a ‘Geographical journey’. The Guardian critic Hannah Booth has added His work tends to focus on the “off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America”. Starting the theme of ‘Community’, I was inspired by Alec to capture everyday life in a significant way. Soth’s specialization of using people as a portal into their own lives entices me to do the same, and make storytelling a different to usual narrative photography.

Alec’s work has inspired me as much of it relates to family and the connection it has to certain and particular location. This fits in well with my surrounding theme of how my personal family is aimed to be connected to a location,  my new house.  I want to use Alec’s style as a way of approaching this connection as I feel its a clear and stylized outlook of family life which is realistic, that observes a mundane representation of life.

“My own awkwardness comforts people, I think. It’s part of the exchange.” 

This quote shows Soth’s mundane placement in society as the photographers main aim it to communicate with society which does not reflect off of himself. However, aside to the normality of Alec’s personality, when taking photographs he states:

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Soth holds a continuous style of showing snippets of images which are non-chronological. This makes the viewer understand the story in a different way. Cleverly, this enables every viewer to see Soth’s story in a different light as many interpretations are then produced.

“The loneliness of travel is endemic in photography’s history for those who leave the studio and travel for their own subjects”.

Here, Soth underlines how photography can sometimes be described as a ‘restricting’ medium. Soth’s desire to travel further with his photographs in order to become deeper within the photograph. This is why many of Alec’s work is journalism based, but only shown through pictures. This sense of a ‘journey’ underlines the narrative tales of the people Alec captures.

Alec uses various different  portraits and landscapes to tell stories (different types of typology). This variation is good towards his ambitious style of documentary photography, as the reader is transgressed through the different stages of this story.

In Soth’s career making photo book ‘Sleeping By The Mississippi‘, Soth illustrates his childhood growing up in Louisiana. The Mississippi River, Alec explains, had tenancy to overflow, ruining the lives of many people. Humorously and ‘without surprise’ according to Soth,  families and natives went by ‘trusting luck’, regardless of the ‘levee going everywhere they go’. This determination, and fixation of remaining home in Louisiana derives the reader into understanding the love of home and family within this overall community.

Living from his imagination, Soths document style has been finalized in the words of Anne Wilkes Tucker, from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston:

“Soth Pries open what he experiences and those whom he met and he wonders (and confirms) that the world can bear & be”.

I went through my old family albums to see how my family took images when i was younger. Some of these images are from when i was little and some are from when my little sister was born. I think that it is interesting to have both of these types of these images in as they show how through time how my family changed taking there images, but also how some of the images are similar even though they are taken around 9 years apart. Most of these images are taken in different settings and some of the images are of better quality than others. I think that the images look really interesting when the quality of them is not that good, as it makes the images look more individual and different from other how other typical photographers take family photographs. These are just some of my family images that i have that show how my family life and how my family take portrait images of one another. 

WEEK 1

This week my shoot is to ask my mum about what makes her anxious and take photographs of her when i ask her questions about this. Throughout these 4 weeks i will also follow my mum around the house and take photographs of her to try to understand her better. When i take these photographs i will either video record her or voice record her this is so i have different recordings of this conversation.   I will also write down the questions that i ask and the response.

WEEK 2

For this week i will follow my dad around and take images of him to show how my mum having anxiety affects him. In this week i will try go to work with him and take some images of his life. In this week i will also take some images of my younger sister and how it affects her.

     WEEK 3  

 In this week i will try to go out with my mum, either when she goes out with some of her friends or when she goes to visit my Nan. In these images this will also show a sense of community which my mum lives in and which she surrounds herself round. On these shoots i will take images of the surroundings as well as the people that my mum meets along the way. 

Throughout these weeks i will take other spontaneous images, when occasions come up when i need to take them. I will follow around my family for the next couple of weeks and take photographs of their lives to tell a story of my mums life.              

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As a starting point, I’ve responded to David Moore contextually. I researched past images of my family, and came across this image of my uncle, my dads brother,  in the 1980s. I felt this image related to Moore’s work as although his work is British based, you can clearly see the similarities regarding the era’s style and complexity.

Phillip Toledano 

One of Toledano’s most famous pieces is his work called ‘Days with my Father, When I was Six’ Toledano took this work within the last few days that he had with his father as he had short term memory loss.  Toledano’s mother suddenly passed away in 2006 and he realised that his mother had been hiding him from the fact that his father has a mental illness. So Toledano took these image to savior the last few moments that he had with his father. I think that this would be a really interesting aspect of family to explore by following one of my family members around and photographing their everyday life. Usually to make these kinds of images you need to take a lot of photographs to have the same effect through the image that you take.

For one of my idea for the theme family i was thinking about following one of my family members around and taking some images of their life. These images have inspired me to photograph my grandma and see the comparisons between their two lives as she is fit and well. I think that this would be an interesting concept to photograph. I think that this image shows on Toledano’s fathers face how confused he is, and also i think that this is quite an upsetting image as the father looks hurt. In these images the lighting and the composition of the photos are not important, what is important is capturing a memory or a moment with his father and i think that these images reflect their relationship.