My final photos were heavily influenced my Barbara Peacocks-American Bedroom. I wanted to create a series of photos of people in their bedrooms in order to link to the mock exams theme of identity (the person) and place (their bedroom). I wanted to empathizes how people use their bedroom as a place to express their self, but I also wanted to tie in the theme of lack of identity by blurring out facial features. I wanted the bedrooms not the peoples faces to be able to describe the person, as I believe that we dress to impress, but our bedrooms are where we show our real self. I want the viewer of my photos to be able to construct an idea of the person through the materialistic items that are in their room or on them. Nowadays we hold such value to materialistic goods, I feel that our personalities are created round the things we own, e.g our clothes and houses. For instance people with a room with very little furniture in it, shows signs of poverty or show signs of a minimalist life. Or someone with very little to no portraits in their room shows signs of loneliness or lack of family, rooms tell a lot about a person.
NC:
I took pictures of 3 different peoples rooms over the build up to the exam and these are the images that turned out the best and I chose to use them in my final pieces. I created a porfolio for each persons room, including a picture of them in their room and several items in their room. I wanted to home in on personal touches that people put in their rooms such as the art work, family photos, toys, laptops, lego, all these create an idea of the person thats room it is. I kept my pictures in colour as I wanted to show the raw and natural beauty of peoples bedrooms and how they reflect our inner and true self, in our room we are free from judgement, we don’t have be afraid of being laughed at or social rejection. When in public most people experience social desirablilty bias and they live to only be accepted by others and not by themselves, their rooms are a place to escape this feeling to fit in and to be black and white, they can be as colourful and as different as they want. In my concept plan I talked about Goffman’s concept of ‘The Representation of The Self in Everyday Life’ and how he believes we have a ‘front’ and a ‘back’ self. From these final pieces I represent both of these self’s as I have a picture of the person, which is the ‘front’ self the one that the public sees and their room acts as their ‘back’ self, the one they conceal from the public eye.
TB:
Once my picture have been printed I am going to mount and frame them on black card. In between each image there will be a border of black card this represents the strcuture of a house and how we hide behind these four walls, it’s where we feel safe. I wanted to express how walls (the black lines between each photo) are the only thing in a house that separate us from each other and empathizes how close we all are from each others true self, just a wall away. Similarly to Peacock’s work, mine has focus on colour and identity, we both focus on the vibrant colours of peoples room and the things they put in them to make them personal to their own identity, whether it’s in America or Jersey we still are all human and all have a private place that is special to us. As well as that I focused on creating a narrative for the person but without speech, simply through images of their rooms. For instance the Peacock photo I analysed created a story of a lonely alcoholic who is addicted to nicotine and works in construction. Similarly my pictures tell a story, for example in my first set of photos their are items such as make up, electronics, a mirror, a dressing room table. From this information, without seeing the picture of the person, you can gather that they are a young women as they are interested in making themselves look pretty and they have the latest techonology.
LB:
