For my personal investigation based around the ideas of Occupation and Liberation, I will be exploring the concept of mental health and mental illness using some ideas of abstraction and modernism as well as elements of street photography/social reform photography.

For my own personal investigation project I wanted to focus on a subject very close to me personally which is mental illness, and more specifically, depression. I find that this fits really well into the idea of occupation/liberation, as it is something that takes a hold of someone, controlling them and cutting them off from the outside, similarly to that of the island during the occupation in WWII. As the idea of mental illness is something that is difficult to see physically, which means that it is much harder to show images which will represent it in the way that I want, as unlike the occupation of jersey which left remnants of bunkers on the island, there are very few ways to tell that anything has happened/is happening inside the head of a person.

However I not only want to create a made up story, but something more personal to me, which is about my own experience, and try to show almost autobiographical elements in a slightly abstract way. The first ideas that come to mind when showing this subject would be something to do with emptiness and Isolation. For instance, I was thinking of using nature to show many of my key points I want to come across for my personal investigation, using lone trees or out of place flowers to show isolation or abandoned buildings to show the concept of being empty.

I have started by drawing up a mind map on different elements of the occupation and things i associate with them or that spring to mind when i read them.

THEME/ISM:

After producing my mind map on areas I interpret as linking to the theme of occupation and mainly liberation, I decided that I would do my product by following the grand theme of the freedom nowadays that people have. The techniques I will use in my project are: Documentary/ Realism and Straight Photography combined with Portraiture. These techniques fit this project well because they will help me to present my work clearly and directly so it is easy to interpret.

MOOD BOARD:

My Statement on Intent/Aim:

My personal study will be revolved around my best friend Max. Max is a 17 year old surfer from Poland who lives with me in Jersey and goes to St. Brelades college to strengthen his English whilst also being given math tutoring with a local teacher. He is of a very wealthy Polish family who carry a high level of class and travel around the world as and when they wish.

My study will therefore be about me exploring the lifestyle of Max and how he counters the stereotypes people may have about polish immigrants on the island whilst demonstrating the extent to which ‘liberation’ has given youth in the modern day to live such luxurious lives and have to freedom to live and explore where they want in the world. I then want to go on to explore further ideas of freedom in relation to liberation and look into the in depth area of travelling.

Towards the end i would like to present my project to show all of the above whilst also being able to create links between both the subject areas whilst also showing where I have taken inspiration from artists such as the two I am looking in to which are Mike Brodie and Theo Gosselin.

Key questions I will be looking into:

• How can photography bear witness to the ways of life or events of the world?

• Does a portrait tell us more about the person portrayed or the photographer?

• Can personality and identity be expressed in a portrait?

• How can photography reflect inner emotions such as fear and isolation?

I have decided to change my project to focus on the lives of my twin sisters. Twins have a bond that is drastic and can't compare to regular relationships between siblings. My sistersd are also identical twins and people regularly associate them as one person. However, I want to display how they aren't the same person and how although they have many similar chracteristice, they also have numerous differences that make them different characters.

Some artists I am considering to look at is Ariko Inaoka as she focuses on the similarities of tins and their intense bond, and fictional photographers such as Vivienne Sassan and Anna Gaskell.

For my personal investigation I will be focusing on people and things effected by World War II, with this I have come up with 2 ideas;

The first – My work is situated on a farm, which has been in Jersey since pre WWII, due to the Germans restricting farm usage during this time, it would have had an influence on the farm. Due to having easy access and a relationship with the owner of the farm and the farm being within the family, I believe it would be easy to gain information about what happened during that time, and acquire photos and maybe some photos during that time.

The second – My grandfather was born in Punjab, India, and was 8 years old during this time of WWII, India was affected during WWII. He is fascinated in genealogy which is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. He has worked with my other grandfather to help retrace the other half of my family. He has retraced his side of the family back generations with immaculate detail. With his passion for genealogy and experience of being a young child during World War 2 I feel that this would be able to bring me much more detail to the story and how it affected him, but also it would bring a personal aspect into it with it being my grandfather but him recollecting his memories from that time.

Another idea and personal aspect to this is on the other side of my family who also had involvement with the world war. My granddad on my dads side was involved in world war 2 and put my grandfather up for adoption with the thought that he wasn’t making it back home after, and the family who then adopted my granddad were an Armenian family, which the father was a survivor from world war 1. My grandmothers father (My great grandfather) was a firefighter during the Blitz, which was Nazi Germany’s sustained aerial bombing campaign against Britain in WWII.

I have to hone in on one section, which I think due to accessibility and being personal will be my granddad who was born in Punjab.

From my mind map I wanted to explore further in depth the idea of investigating Occupation Vs Liberation, to see where it could take me and enable me to represent and portray something personal and something that I would be able to develop and grow ideas off. However I decided to branch away from the idea of Occupation as it would limit me in aspect of having to concentrate on the Jersey island itself, as well as this factor the Occupation of Jersey is already an area that I have deeply explored and investigated in previous work. Therefore, I wanted to take this opportunity to try something different and possibly an area that i had a great passion for which would allow me to satisfy my fascination for the topic itself.

From this first mind map and mood board, it has allowed me to begin to grasp my initial ideas and have a concept of where I want to go with the project in the future linking to the final outcomes. For this project I have decided to look closer to my dance background and placing it with the idea of feeling liberated through dancing and further connotation that may come along with this aspect. This is a topic that hugely interests me as it is a huge part of my life and a big commitment. As well as dancing myself since a young age, I have an even bigger love of watching it and seeing the development and movement of individual dancers, following there careers, to me this adds inspiration and motivations. For this project I have decided to project my enthusiasm and liberation of dance through other dancers history, background, love and other factors that I might find along the way. Furthermore, I will use archival photos from each individuals dance albums and that shows images from when they were younger to help project the journey they have gone through to where they are now in their dancing history. Finally, I will discover the deeper meaning and feeling that presents dancers on a daily and the concept of what dance means to them, this will allow me to look closely at the conceptual and contextual aspects of the individual and the liberation of dance.