Intro

For my project, I have decided to focus upon the story of my grandfather and his time serving in the Royal Air Force. I have found a set of photographs from my grandfathers deployment to RAF Habbaniya Air base in Iraq in 1951 as a munitions officer. I have chosen to replicate the photographs taken of him and re-enact them myself as a form of self identity as my grandfather was one of my biggest influences in life. The original images range from images of him in scenes of leisure to him in uniform operating machinery such as munitions lorries etc.

Original Images

Below are the original pre-edit images of my grandfather taken in Iraq. The images are yellowed with age so I am looking to convert them to black and white for usage in my project to give them a rejuvenated look and feel.

My responses

Despite not being in the Air Force myself or being based in Iraq, I have attempted to recreate these images as best as I can using locations and environments available to me in Jersey, focusing primarily on the poses and body positioning of my Grandfather as well as backdrop. For example in the below image, My grandfather is stood in front of a shack with a low roof. I decided to find a similar building and photograph myself in a similar pose to my Grandfather as shown below.

While my recreated version of the above image features the roof slanting the opposite way to the image with my grandfather, I find that rather than flip the image so that my image matches the one of my grandfather in terms of composition, I shall keep my recreated image as it is due to the fact that both images will be opposite each other, essentially creating a mirror image as such as detailed in the image below