After researching different photographers, the photographer who most caught my attention was Mahtab Hussain. This photographer looks at his cultural background and how people live nowadays. I have chosen to follow this photographer for this project because the life that Portuguese people live, really interests me. I decided to do this and plan to take photos of my day to day life, to show how youngsters live in a different country. I thought this would be the ideal project to look into because there are so many immigrants in Jersey which originate from Portuguese speaking countries, mainly Madeira.

In my images I aim to show how gender affects different lifestyles in the Portuguese community. I also believe that these ideas affects the younger generation due to the respect insisted by older family. I find this very interesting as I believe that males tend to live a free life, whereas females tend to stay home with their mothers. Portuguese men traditionally go for heavy duty jobs, mainly in construction and women work more in domestics. I aim to focus on family, relationships, home life and religion/tradition.

Living within a Portuguese family allows me to explore these details with more depth and explore the variations and similarities within different cultures. I will be doing this by shooting specific hours and days in my day to day life that I believe strongly represent other Portuguese families and immigration from Portuguese to English speaking countries. Stereotyping plays a huge role in this project, not all migrant Portuguese families live the same way however, I believe that there is a stronger relationship to this with Madeiran families rather than main land Portugal. I think this is the case as Portugal tends to be more advanced and people tend to be more accepting of the new ways of thinking, on the other hand, Madeiran families can be narrow minded and insist a lot of respect with the older ways of thinking. With this project, I want to show how important religion is to most Portuguese families, along with family traditions and the difference in lifestyles from males and females, both old and young.

When doing my research I decided that my main subject in all photographs was going to be people. I have always had an interest in portraits and exploring different types through my camera. A lot of my personal work also includes facial features, from humans and animals too. Silence says more than a speech and actions speak louder than words and I enjoy the fact that photographs are silent moments, and silent moments are usually used to appreciate situations.

My love for silence has sprung from my experiences in photography where I have been able to understand people from a deeper perspective and after living difficult situations in life I always explore peoples facial expressions, and focus on the eyes. Whilst also exploring the life of an immigrant through portraiture, I also plan to capture images of objects, possibly handmade/traditional. I rarely photograph objects but I think it could be really strong used as a pause between the images.