For this shoot I was inspired by the Shakespeare play, Macbeth. In Act 5, Scene 1 where Lady Macbeth is relentlessly scrubbing her hands because she is having a hallucination of the King’s blood. This scene is a representation of her subconscious guilt and how the murder is haunting her on the inside. ‘Out damned spot, out I say!’, this is what she said when she was violently washing her hands, even though there was nothing on it. Lady Macbeth goes on to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and eventually kills herself because of these visions and remorse.

This links to my personal study because blood runs in the family. You can runaway, get adopted, your parents can die but you will always be connected to your family via DNA. Lady Macbeth was trying to get rid of the imaginary blood, but she can’t because the murder is now permanently en-scripted in her memory. Likewise no matter how much you try to distant yourself from your family, they will forever be running through your blood, in your genetics.

The hands are my own, I set my camera to about neck height to get a viewpoint of my head looking down at them. I used red food colouring as ‘blood’ and kept reapply to make is look as ‘fresh’ as possible. I used Manual setting and autofocus so I could adjust myself to whether I wanted a dark feel or not. Some of the images featuring the sink I used flash as it is generally dark in that corner of the bathroom.

These images are from a photoshoot I did, trying to collect some images I thought would work with my personal study whilst also juxtaposing them. The purpose of these images and the feeling I wanted to get from them was purely aesthetic while trying to envoke an emotional response that isn’t constructed.

I was trying to decide here between a more saturated and vivid effect, bringing out the neons and making the colours and lights the focus of the image, or have the image less saturated, with the colours still being the most obvious feature but also focusing on the scene captured itself.

Again, in these sets of images, I was trying to decide whether I wanted the colours to stand out the most or if I wanted a sort of muted look. In all the images I liked the reflections and wanted to name them to stand out which I think I achieved in images 1 and 3. Looking back, I would’ve cropped them to frame them better.

Rae is based in Australia, Melbourne, but came to my knowledge through her exhibition at CCA Galleries alongside Claude Cahun’s work. Her work is influenced by feminist theories and the female body, she uses her body as the focal point of many of her images. The iamge below is taken from her series ‘Never standing on two feet‘, which consider’s Cahun’s engagment with the physical and cultural landscapes of Jersey The photographs Cahun produced in Jersey are intimate. They explore an idea of self within the immediate environment and were produced in collaboration with her lover, Marcel Moore. Many threads of inquiry emerged for me while viewing the archive: Cahun’s performative photographic gestures; the nature of photographic performance for a lover; and the repercussions of imaging a woman’s body aging over time, to name a few.

This photo is powerful through it’s use of naturalistic imagery with the combination of a portraits. There is high contrast between the two genres, yet they work in harmony in this image if hers. Feminist ideologies can be seen via her clothing choice of a skirt, which is connotated as a stereotypical feminine item. The posture is ‘un-lady like’, how her legs are open and she is slouching backwards over the rock as if she is at home and not in public. She uses black and white, which is influenced by the work of Claude Cahun at a time when colour photography was fairly new and expensive.The black and white symbolizes the out-dated patriarchal society Cahun once lived in, where there were certain gender roles written into everyday life, that belittle women as the inferior sex. Rae is challenging dominant modes of representation around female identity. This image is a self-portrait, which she is set up and captured on a timer, a main interest of her work is experimenting with performance documentation and how the camera is part of the image, it isn’t just a witness, it’s a performer as well. Although her positioning and posture is awkward and uncomfortable, it doesn’t overpower the image, it blends with the romanticism of the surroundings. Rae’s use of femininity also creates a sense of delicacy, she may be wearing a skirt which has connotations of sexual confidence, but it is mid-length which adds a sense of modesty. She doesn’t want to drown out the background with over-sexualising and objectivity her body. The way she is laying vulnerably over the rock, suggests lack of control over her gender. Many women face sexism and have their life planned out by society, some don’t get an education, some will only ever be a stay at home mum, who cooks and cleans for the duration of her life. Her work relates to my photobook as it displays ideas of conflict with gender/sexual identification. This links to my work as I am exploring personal identity and how it fluctuated and confused me at the time of my parents separation. Her fusion of nature and identity I am going to use in some of my shoots. I feel that nature connects to the idea of genetics and family, which relates to the fact you are born into a certain bloodline whether you like it or not, you have no free-will in the matter.

Within this photoshoot, I have again gone to the south and west side of Jersey to take images of bunkers. In this photoshoot the main area I went to was Batterie Moltke, but again I went to other smaller bunkers within Jersey. I decided to also have these images in black and white due to the fact that it will fit nicely with any archive imagery I use. I have increased contrast a lot within these images to show the details within the darker areas of the image and create more focus on the main parts of these images, which are generally the darker parts. I have only used natural lighting to take these images. The cloudy and white background also creates a dull look looming over the image. This can be used to symbolize how terrifying the occupation could have been.

Below is a selection of the best images from the photoshoot:

These are the edited, final images I have chosen from this photo shoot:

This series of screenshots documents the editing process for one of the images

In this photoshoot. I am going to go back to more bunkers on the south and west side of the island. I am going to look closely at the details within the bunkers of how they have eroded and at the architecture within the bunkers. This will allow me to show how they were built and how well they were built by the workers that the Germans commanded. I will likely wait for some amount of clear weather before going, but will likely go out while it is quite cloudy, like I have done in my previous photoshoot. This will give the images a dull look and make the occupation seem like a dull and potentially horrifying time for people who lived during it.