Michelle Sank is a social demographic photographer who was born in Cape Town, South Africa and lived there until 1987. She takes photos which reflect human condition and can be seen as a style of documentary photography regarding social issues and cultural diversity. She captures, collects and re-tells her encounters with people in certain communities. She is well known for her work with the youth and has various series of photos on this topic. These photos have a sort of coming of age theme where the subjects are dealing with adolescent struggles and trying to find their own identity and place in the world. She allows her subjects to be completely themselves helping their personality show through n the images rather than adapting them to look ‘Normal’. I like the way the subjects look so comfortable and unaffected by the presence of a photographer yet there is also something unnerving about the photos due to how real they are despite being composed and set up.

In 2013 Michelle Sank visited and stayed in Jersey for 6 months working on the Archisle project and Insula. her collection features mainly staged portraits along with some landscape work to help provide context and setting to the collection. Insula is a response to nineteenth century portrait photographers who captured the wealth in the island. The images show the cultural geography of the island from the perspective of an outsider. The photos play around the topic of emotion, culture, politics, economics and island life. They were taken as part of the Archisle contemporary photography programme at the Societe Jersiase photo archive.

Technical: This photo has been taken using natural lighting, due to the harsh shadows, and bright colours it looks as though it was a sunny day. The shadows give the image high contrast which makes the minimal colours in the image pop. The background is slightly blurred which could means a medium aperture was used to subtly change the depth of field so that the camera focuses more the subject. A low sensitivity shutter speed has been used to capture a sharp and still image. The image has a slight cool tone which cancels out any orange tones from the strong sun light making it more of . colour accurate image.

Visual: The colours in this photograph are very simple, blue, green and various shades of brown. This makes us, the viewer focus in on the detail and texture in the image such as the lettering on the bench and the material of the ladies clothes. The composition of this image is interesting, although it looks a bit like a documentary style image of two old ladies sitting on a park bench we can tell some parts of the image have been set up. Firstly the subjects ere aware that they are being photographed and are looking directly at the camera, this subjects they had a conversation with the photographer. the photo has also been taken from a slightly low angle so we are looking up at the subjects. The women are sitting upright with their hands on their laps which looks slightly staged and unnatural but also helps to create a formal tone to the image. I think an interesting part of the composition which the photographer has considered is the word on the bench reading ‘gaze’. The subjects could be considered to be gazing at the camera, the one closest to us has a frown and the one further away is slightly smiling, this could be a coincidence but it also could have been set up by the photographer to create a contrasting mood to the image.