What I learnt most from the occupation vs liberation project is that occupation doesn’t have to be physical, such as the occupation of Jersey in WWII. There are many other forms, be that mental, subconscious or many others. This opens up a wide possibility of subjects; ranging from far-fetched government conspiracy theories, to technology and how we use it more everyday.
I was inspired most by high contrast techniques in this project. I really enjoyed the visual aspect of making the subject of each photo ‘pop’ and stand out from the background.
The first photo shoot I carried out didn’t have a specific purpose, it was mainly trying out using different backgrounds and angles when photographing occupation/war items. This photo is of old war bandages, I decided to go for an all-yellow background instead of using a different colour for the bottom or back sheet. This helps create a much smoother effect than using different colours. It also helps create more contrast between the foreground and background as there is a constant amount between the mostly red foreground and entirely yellow background than if background was half yellow and half purple, as the background would be contrasting with itself, which also makes it less pleasing to look at.
In the photo shoot that this image is part of I started to explore the theme of Occupation vs Liberation more, specifically occupation. The image is composed of three elements, a modern phone, a retro CD, and a vintage cassette tape. They are all arranged in order of when they were produced, from newest (left) to oldest (right). The CD and cassette tape all contain war/occupation related content, the CD documenting a re-creation of a day in the life in occupied Jersey, and the cassette tape being a recording of islanders recalling the occupation. What connects all of these is a way of enslaving people, the CD and cassette tape are both recordings of people being physically enslaved during the occupation as well as enslaving people in the digital era, and slowly getting them addicted to consuming the content. The modern phone carries this theme forward of enslaving people, this is no longer physically but now purely digitally, being addicted to social media and other features of it.
This image is from the save photo shoot as the previous image, it takes the message further by showing more generations of digital devices. The floppy disc on the right shows and even older generation of this, predecessing all of the others. And to the left is an ipod, which was mainly present between the time of the iphone and CD. I didn’t have these two objects on hand, or in possession so I decided to draw them in on Photoshop, which also gives the image a pleasing photo montage effect.
This image has less meaning behind it compared to the others, although it carries on the theme of digital occupation. It is a simple image of two CD’s which i have manipulated in many different ways. I couldn’t pick a single favourite to use so I put all six into a montage and used them all instead.
Mind-map + mood board on how I interpret occupation vs liberation now.
