As my personal investigation progresses and i research more into the topic of family and environment i am going to do a small review and reflect on my project so far. After my trip to Africa i collected a vast variety of family, community and environmental images in a documentary and photojournalist style. After editing and refining my choices i picked 6 images to go in the exhibition which was located at the jersey arts center in the ‘Constructed Narratives’ exhibition. Moving on i need to focus on assessment objective 2 which includes further experimentation with my images and further refinements. I want to experiment with my First few shoots i did seeing how i can digitally manipulate them to create a more manipulated and staged story/message. However i also think that i should focus on doing some more shoots on exploring family and environment in jersey and then id be able to do a comparison between the different shoots and look at the similarities and differences between community and family life in Africa and in jersey. Also investigating the different techniques and styles which are used to captures a message in images from different cultures.
Moving on i am going to start to focus on my personal study which is linked to to the theme of family and be specific to the style i am trying to capture. As my personal investigation is specific to capturing third world countries and the community life in areas of poverty and hardship i am going to explore this in my study. i want to come up with a hypothesis which will lead to into exploring realism as a style of photography and how it an be manipulated and not always truthful. By focusing on realism i will be able to explore further photographers such as Steve McCurry and Sebastian Salgado and how they represent third third issues in different styles. I would also like to link into this the ‘Insider VS Outsider’ approach as i think that photographers from an outside perspective looking in on third world countries will never be able to truly capture the sense of community and the harshness of life truthfully, this further links into the topic of objectivity and how photographs may vary due to how subjective photographers may be.
Below is a mind map of initial ideas for the title and focal point of my personal study:
- ‘How powerful/useful is photography in revealing worldwide issues?’
- ‘Can an outsider ever really represent third world issues truthfully?’
- ‘Is it possible for photography to capture moments in time objectively and truthfully?’
- ‘In what way has photojournalism had an impact on creating awareness of worldwide issues?’
- ‘How does subjectivity effect the authenticity of photographs representing third world countries?’
These were a few of my initial essay questions which focus on questioning the key areas of photograph which my investigation focuses on. However after producing these ideas for a hypothesis i still wasn’t certain that any of them were worded/included the ideas that i wanted to focus on. Therefore i started to look at influential photographers works at essay writing examples and the type of points that they focused on to give me inspiration. Using books of photographers such as David Bate and Susan Sontag as well as Maey Ellen Mark, i started to gather a greater understanding of the theory of representation and other key theoretical concepts.
Through reading Mary Ellen Mark’s ‘The Photo Essay’, its opened my eyes to different concepts, most noteablely the idea of exploitation. I think that the idea of how society and the community of these third world countries which are capture to make hard hitting message images may be being exploited in the process.
Furthermore ‘The Key Concepts’, written by photographer David Bate enhanced my knowledge on representation and the idea of realism. Through reading i have gathered ideas of what i want to focus on and a few key points which really caught my attention which could potentially be included in my Personal Study.
‘Manifesting a desire for reality.’
‘Documentary photography construct representations of reality according to someone’s view, their desire to see.’
The above quotes can be seen as relation to the concept of subjectivity Vs Objectivity and the idea that all photographers have a viewpoint and however objective they try to be to capture the reality of a specific event, their mind eye is always going to have some kind of input making them possess a subjective viewpoint which may effect the truthfulness of the images and the way that they represent third world countries.
