Choose Life

To introduce my book I wanted to make it clear to the audience this sense of lifestyle which is the ongoing theme within my book. This set of images on the opening page show these ideas of variation through the outfits worn to the locations being visited by these individuals. Another main focus within my book was to highlight the lifestyles seen throughout and to focus on the individuals through the skateboarding lifestyle but within the sport itself. Throughout the book I used multiple different layouts as I believe it created a strong variation throughout which has kept the book Interesting and consistent. Furthermore, Within the book I focused heavily on documentary photography as I found the photographers I looked at, their work fell heavily into the documentary style which I believed would create an interesting concept throughout. In addition, these photos were taken on film in both black and white and colour and are pretty much untouched when being edited. I wanted my book to have a raw feeling to it as I found that these photos told the story of each individual without having been altered or manipulated in anyway. I believe by having done this it has created a documentary style theme throughout the book emphasising each individual image. The name of the book comes from a very well known film which I thought would be an interesting title for this book as I was focusing on the lifestyle of these boys. The actual meaning of choose life was to promote an anti drug movement, within this lifestyle drugs play a large part within these subjects lives. By having choose life as the title of this book I believe it represents this lifestyle as a whole ranging from the highs and the lows. To finish the book I implemented the image of the two boys turned away from the camera, I used this image in particular to close the book as I believe it has connotations of them turning away from all the problems and accidents that this lifestyle has had within their lives and allowing for them to focus and enjoy on the positives that this lifestyle holds.

Choose Life

I wanted to incorporate the typologies theme throughout my final prints as I felt this theme conveyed a contact sheet style which I thought would have an interesting outcome for my final images. I wasn’t sure how to display my images, so I came up with multiple different layouts however the three layouts above where the ones I decided on and thought where the strongest layouts and had the strongest images in throughout. However, when looking at a traditional typology or contact sheet they were all portrait which allowed me to narrow down my decision and resulting in me using the two portrait orientation layouts for my final decision. Furthermore, when displaying my images I wanted to create window mounts for my display as I believe my images would be suited better with a little white boarder round the outside of each image and allowed for a stronger effect then if I had just stuck them onto the black mounting card. I decided on using these images as I believed that each individual one had some sort of relation to each other and found they complemented each other strongly within the set. When laying out the images I found I wanted to relate to the theme of the project ‘Variation and Similarity’. I was able to use this theme when laying out and selecting my images as I wanted to include images as part of a set however I also wanted to create a bit of variation within the layout by having a juxtaposing image run through the middle of the the two similar ones. I found by doing this changed up the layout of my images including an obvious variation between the layout and the images. I believe this created a strong effect on the layout which I believe allowed for it to be a more interesting final outcome.

These where my final outcomes.