Specification:

My idea is to create a project about my granddad, showing how his life has changed dramatically from illness, which started from a stroke, leading to other illnesses impacting his life. He did not only change physically having his eye removed, losing control of the left side of his face, the incapability to walk and having difficulty communicating. But he also changed emotionally, his personality changing hugely, his sense of humour changed as we found he was now a more serious person than he ever was before. He often gets frustrated with himself when he can’t do tasks he once could do, such as walk long distances, driving, having a bath, read a book, fly on a plane to go on holiday and making dinner.

Now as a result of his illness, he can’t:

• Walk far at all and when he does walk he has to use a walking stick and often gets heart pains, he use to love walking and exercising so this becomes frustrating and upsetting for him as he can’t do what he once enjoyed.
• He can’t drive as he got his driving license taken off him as he would be incapable to drive safely on the roads, as he is only now has one eye and finds it hard to feel his feet, often they cramp up, leaving him with an extreme pain. This is hard for him to get out the house to go to various places, which stops him going out at all. He goes out once a week normally to play dominos at his local pub, he looks forward to this time of the week.
• He now has to have a shower instead of a bath as he is unable to get into the bath and out of the bath, which makes him feel helpless and as if he can’t do anything for himself anymore. You can really see that this affects him.
• He loved books and learning new things, he was and still is a very intelligent man. However, he now can’t read the small text in a book, so often uses a kindle, which he can change the text size or has to use a magnifying glass to make the words big enough for him to read. His reading speed is increasing getting slower, which makes it hard for him to read.
• He also has been advised not to get on flights longer than an hour, which makes him anxious about travelling, this results in me and my family not seeing him as much as we would like as we would have to flight to see him all the time, which is hard for my parents to get time off work and flights become expensive.

My project will consist of archival images of my granddad before he was affected by the stroke, when he was the person everyone in his life before this remembered him, some of these will be adapted. It will also include documentary photographs of him performing his daily routine and I will also take images of images, which  have great significance to his routine. Some of these images may be slightly staged but they will all be of things he would usually do on a day to day basis.

The main concept of this project is how a change biologically can affect the individual mentally and physically. The project aims to show these changes.

My Mood Board: