Reviewing and Reflecting:

From your Personal Investigation based on OCCUPATION vs LIBERATION write an overview of what you learned and how you intend to develop your Personal Study.
Describe which themes, approaches (LANDSCAPE, PEOPLE, OBJECTS), artists, skills and photographic processes/ techniques inspired you the most and why.
Include examples of current experiments to illustrate your thinking.
Produce a new mind-map and mood-board based around how you interpret the theme of OCCUPATION vs LIBERATION now.

Overview:

In June, we began our personal investigation based on ‘Occupation Vs Liberation.’ To begin with, due to the nice weather, we focused on the bunker fortifications left behind by the Nazi occupying forces. This would be the focus of our first zine. This was followed by looking at the people involved in the Occupation, including those who are still alive today, and how objects and still life could be used to tell the Occupation story. This would be our second zine. Where as I had looked at still life and portraiture during AS, landscape was an area of photography I had yet to explore in detail or try out for myself. I thoroughly enjoyed the project as a whole, I found myself continuously lost in the landscape shoots while also discovering a new interest for portraits. This is what I hope to use in my personal study to show a new take of the idea of ‘Occupation Vs Liberation.’

New skills and inspiration learnt:

From day one, I had already been introduced to a way to improve and research my photography in a way I had never considered before. This was the use of archive images. We are incredibly lucky in Jersey to have access to our very own photo archive at the Societe Jersiaise. It was incredibly interesting to see some of the old photos from 1940-45 because I realized that maybe I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about the Occupation. However, the use of these images never really crossed my mind after that until much later. If I’m being completely honest, I had no intention of ever incorporating archive images with my own, at least not during the landscape part of the project. With archive out of my mind, we began our first shoot for landscapes. A permanent reminder of Nazi occupation are the remains of the concrete bunkers they built to fortify the Island. This was of course the perfect thing to photograph for this project. While visiting Battery Lothringen at Noirmont, we were given the opportunity to go inside one of the bunkers and take photos of the displays inside. This meant that we had to adjust the settings on our cameras to accommodate for the lack of light. I was reluctant to rise the ISO above 1600 as I didn’t want my image being grainy. To compensate for this I had to use a low aperture to allow for as much light as possible to enter the camera lens. I then went on to use this when taking photos at Jersey War Tunnels.

A second major skill that I was introduced to was zine making. I had never used InDesign before, but quickly caught on with how to layout my images in a way that created a narrative that told showed the relationship between Islanders and their occupiers.