My personal study is based on divorce and separation. I will be exploring how a split between two people can affect a whole family. My idea links to the occupation vs liberation theme, the occupation connects to before the divorce and how my parents felt uneased in each others company. The liberation relates to how the split was for the best for my parents but it also created a lot of changed and instability for me. Via my personal experience I am going to create images that display feelings of lack of identity and belonging. Divorce is such a common action these days that it gets overlooked, I want to highlight that although its not an abnormal family situation, it is still life changing. I’m going to take a documentary approach by taking picture of old house I have lived in, old toys and old photos that remind of the times where I missed either my mum or dad. After I am going to explore surrealism and post-modernism approaches to represent my inner conflict during the divorce. I am going to hold interviews with my parent about their experience as well as some of my friends with divorced parents and some with parents still together. These interviews will help to give me a more accurate representation of divorce as everyone takes it differently also it will provide me with different viewpoints by also interviewing my parents.

My first shoot will inspired be by surrealist photographer Chris McKenney. His ‘Self-Ghost’s’ project is a representation of the supernatural and horror genre, which is what I want to use as it lacks identity even though his images are portraits. I am going to take my brother to a forest or nature filled backdrop similar to McKenney and place a sheet on his head to hid this face. A box is going to present in those images as it represents how I have to pack up my belongings everytime I go to my mums or dads and to express how many times I have moved house. Hopefully, I will highlight the idea that you can pack your whole life into cardboard boxes and each time it gets harder because as soon as you have settled another box appears. .I am then going to stray away from McKenney’s supernatural approach and take pictures of my brothers hands on trees, then up against the semi-see through windows in the bathroom.

-Amition, the idea that Jersey is restricing for young people these days, like how in the occupation you had to deal with what you had on the island, there was no way you could leave to go to the mainland.

-Identity, jersey again is a small place, views on the island can be very outdated people are stuck in their old ways, especially the older generation those who experience much more hardship than us.

-Voice, exploring how much of a voice the younger generation have, do they vote, do the older generation feel like we should have a say, do they think we are mature enough to know what the island needs.

-Security, during the war houses were where people felt most secure. Myself, I feel most safe at my mums house rather than my dads its more familiar and homely to me. Recent things such as the Grouville rape have made me more inclined to stay at home especially now that is gets so dark so early.

-Choice, there is any option in Jersey now i’m writing my personal statement for university because there is nothing I want to do that involves staying in Jersey, compared to the UK there are very little apprenticeships, the majority of work is within the finance industry, there are no universities on island and there is only one non fee-paying school that offers A-levels.

-Wealth, in my option Jersey is extremely money orientated. The ever growing finance sector, the tax heaven it offers for the ultra-rich, the constant supply of new accommodation. All these fail Jersey’s natural environment, for instance the new development at West Quay has caused pollution to the marina. More and more housing, offices, mansions are being built on our island yet the government are taking years to decide where to build the new hospital.

-Democracy, our government/states formation is complex and confusing, when I voted for the first time I was confused by the amount of people I was voting for, in St Brelades there are several people running for constable but in some parishes there is only one person who runs and they are automatically given the place this isn’t democratic in any way it seems corrupt to me.

-Separation, my parents have been divorced ever since I was little and I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a struggle, the main reason for this is my step-mum we never really got on. having two everything is now normal to me but it forced me to make decisions other kids didn’t have to make. My mum took the divorce the worst and I noticed as a young kid she was going through emotional distress.

-Sleep, as a kid I used to dread going to bed, i would have endless nightmares. Now I can’t wait to sleep it’s what I look forward to the most. I want to explore how different people have different experiences of sleep and how it can be a struggle for one personal but a joy for others, this can come with age or life events.

-Water, I have this phobia of deep sea and the unknown of whats beneath me. I don’t like fish coming close to me, in fact I just don’t like fish at all. I think the thing that scares me the most about the sea is the fact their is so much of it, many areas that haven’t even been discovered yet, the possibility of unknown animals is dawning. Even in a closed off swimming pool I get panicked about a potential shark. The biggest problem I have with this is that I love swimming it’s always been my best sport but only when its in a pool full of other people.

The occupation VS liberation project was beneficial to me as before starting it I was questioning how I could connect with it as I only had one member of my family still alive today who had experienced war and she was only a newborn. The project made me realize I font have to have family connections to war, when Bob came in although I didn’t know him his stories still fascinated me. It has definitely given me more of an appreciation towards the Islands history before I didn’t think much of it. I want my personal study to be a development of the occupation and how many people felt helpless, they have no role whilst others were out fighting they were just trapped on the island no way of contributing. Many people were jobless, many from Jersey before would go to the mainland to discover themselves and find a job they have passion for because the tiny island lacked that and personally it still does today. I enjoyed taking landscapes as there are so many bunkers on the island which are easily accessible to me and the scenery around them is stunning because they were built to defend the island on its coastline. As well as that I enjoyed the shoot with my gran as I have always wanted to take pictures of her house as it has such character and it has an old interior which is outdated but it feels homely. This photo shoot was for the home sweet home task so it wasn’t a direct link to the occupation but to me it was a metaphor for how important people homes were to them because many had curfews or were under house arrest so their homes were a reflection of their interests and personalities. Homes during the occupation were places of security and privacy, away from the enemy, away from harm possessively. Mat Collishaw took my interest as he was a contemporary, modern artist but used old techniques and concepts, its that contrast between old and new that I like.

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The title ‘Within it All’ suits my zine narrative as it is about living amongst chaos. For the typography I have used ‘New Courier’, I chose it as it looks like type writer font, which would have been used by people at the time of the war to document daily life. My front cover features a bandage from the time of the occupation, it represents the start of the occupation and how a lot of damage was about to be caused.

This is my first double page spread and features a photo-montage. The first step was taking a photo of the Archive’s occupation diary, then I trimmed an image of the Radio Tower during the occupation and placed that layer on top of the diary. This montage emphasizes the importance of historic documents and stories. The Radio Tower symbolizes the diaries context coming to life and educating us on Jersey’s past, without writing these bunkers wouldn’t have a narrative. It fits into my narrative as signifies the start of the people of Jersey’s new story in life.

These pages are close ups of more objects from the Jersey Archive. The first is of a flash light used to guide people in the dark when they are making their way home before curfew hours commence. The second image is of a CD and cassette of music played by those who were occupied. These two photos displayed objects that made life easier for people to live. The light was an essential to everyone during the winter season, when is was dark and there were no street lights to guide them to the comfort of their homes. Music to this day is used for entertainment purposes, for me personally a good song puts me in a good mood, it was a way for people to enjoy themselves in times of such sadness. These two pictures represent a rebellion to the Nazi’s and how the people of Jersey wanted to prove that even though they are being oppressed, it isn’t going to stop them having a good time.

This image was taken from my Home Sweet Home shoot where I took pictures of my gran’s house. She was only a baby when the war ended so she didn’t experience the full hardship of war but nonetheless her parents still did. Her parents are both situated on the right hand side of the fire ledge, they represent the eyes of the war, these were the people who listened to music, used flashlights and wrote occupation diaries, they are the story tellers. I chose to use black and white to symbolize war photography and how colour hadn’t become popular or affordable. This image relates the narrative as it a shift in tone from reminiscing the past to actually being part of the past.

I used my gran’s kitchen as the interior is relatively out-dated compared to modern day minimalism. I don’t mean this in a bad way, my gran’s house has character and holds great memories of my childhood. The kitchen in my opinion is something out of an old black and white sitcom. The ancient micro-wave, the tiled walls and the neatly arranged spices. The pots and pans fit into the narrative as they emphasis the gender roles of the time at the start of the occupation. Women were seen as inferior, they were house wife’s destined for a life of cooking and cleaning, the men were the ones providing for the family.

This double page spread is of my gran’s fridge and fridge magnet collection of all the places she has visited in her life. This moves the narrative to times when females were sent to go and do the men’s jobs as they were busy at war. This was a significant time of gender equality, the magnets symbolize how women have their own lives now thanks to women who stood up for their rights. My gran still goes away, she has a social life but her mother would have had a very different life of staying indoors and looking after her and her sisters.

The lamp shade represents the idea of light at the end of the tunnel, the liberation is near, the men can soon come home. The large amount of family photos emphasize the importance of family during the occupation, how a strong family bond can make or break a person even today. When the men went away to war, they were missed, families dreaded receiving letters of death from the post-men. The box of tinkets are a metaphor for the people of Jersey and how they were locked away during the occupation, the Nazi’s held the key to everything, whether they could go for a walk, move house, buy food.

I used 3D triangular steel poles and miniature people as the objects, the background was created via yellow and green card. The poles symbolize the change the war has created in Jersey e.g bunkers. The miniature people represent the people of Jersey after the occupation and how they have to work around such change to everyday life on the island. This image relates most to the the title ‘within it all’ as the mini people are having it carry on as normal once they are liberated despite the mental distress they have encountered as well as the physical changes to the island.

I used the same bandage box as my back cover but from a different angle. The front cover image represented the damage the occupation was going to the cause, whereas this bandage suggests a different sort of damage. The bandage is now a symbol for liberation and now there is different damage to sort out. Plasters and bandages don’t always heal the area, sometimes it’s just a way of masking the pain and procrastinating about the problem. This relates to the liberation as people had gone through so much trauma yet they were given the news of liberation and were expected to return to normal.

Green and red are complimenting and I wanted their to be as much red as possible to symbolize blood and death. The tin is red which is a metaphor for the how the bandage is going to eventually turn red due to covering up a bloody wound. I made sort the ration of red to green was bigger as the green is meant to look like it is being consumed by the red. The rate of death everyday kept increasing during the war, the green symbolizes life’s left and its gradually becoming less and less. The green also represents nature and how it was being destroyed by bombs, stomping, trenches and deserted rotting bodies.

Purple and yellow card was used as my background colours as they are complimentary to each other. The bright colours create contrast between the beige box and book. On the contrary I purposely made the box to look at of place because I wanted it to be the focal point as a Red Cross Box held so much importance to those who received them. Although the outside is plain and uninteresting the contents were the opposite these boxes held the power of life or death for some people.

This image was originally from my first shoot, the occupation diary and the radio tower is from an archive image. I went through the process of trimming and cropping the radio tower out of its initial background and placing it on top of the diary to create this montage. The photo highlights the importance of documenting the past through the use of writing and photographing. The radio tower symbolizes the significance of historical documents and how they recreate the past and educate us. Without narrative from the time of the occupation we wouldn’t have a story behind Jersey’s bunkers.

For this image I used miniature people, a green and yellow card background and triangular metal poles. Even though it doesn’t feature any literal occupation objects it has a historical concept. The miniature people symbolize the people of Jersey and the poles are the change made by the occupation for instance bunkers. This image displays how locals had to cope with such drastic changes to their daily life with curfews, their loved ones leaving and rationing. Although this disruption was going on, people had to get on with their lives and stay strong for their remaining families. From another perspective the poles represent mental trauma that was left with some many people after the war.

For our introduction into the objects section of our coursework we were to take pictures of archive objects in the studio. We had a lesson in which we were taught how to uses the different lights and how to sync them with the cameras as well as setting up the correct white balance, shutter speed and aperture. There were two different angles used to create these images, downwards and forwards. All my images were created in artificial lighting through the use of tungsten and flash lights in the studio. There is high level of control in the positioning of each object through a system of taking the photo, examining the position and relocating the object if necessary. I kept my aperture at F16 to ensure I had a wide depth of field and ISO at 125. My white balance was sunlight so that there was accurate white colour balance to complement the objects colour tones. In light room I used the spot removal tool to get rid of smear and rain marks that were on camera I used in the studio, that I wasn’t aware was dirty at the time.

This image features two CD’s with songs from the occupation that were played and sang by people from Jersey. I positioned them centrally at equal angles and with a white background to make them the focal point. The use of artificial lighting creates a reflection of the plastic casing and disc. This image is simplistic from the out look but conceptually the symmetry of the CD’s symbolise the stability music gave to many people. Music was a form of escapism for many, to enjoy and forget about times of hardship. War songs were sang by those in the battle fields to raise spirits of the thought of one day returning home and singing it with the ones they love.

This image features a bandage and its packaging from the time of the occupation. I wanted to have as white a background as possible so that the red would stand out as the focal point of the image. I chose this item as I felt the red box work in harmony with the use of the bandage being to cover up bloody wounds, the literal works as its metaphorical colour. It is ironic that the inside of the packaging will soon look like the outside, this is similar to a soldier at war. The soldier one day many physically be wounded and as time goes on that outside damage becomes internal and mental.

For this image the positions of the hat were limited so I didn’t have any options to work with. I set the camera up in front of the reflective screen as I knew metal helmet along with the flash lights would create a mirroring reflection beneath. The reflection represents the person underneath the hat, ones the hat comes off you dissociate the person with being a soldier but that person never forgets they are a soldier. It’s a metaphor for the trauma they have to walk around with for the rest of their lives, some may say they are lucky because they made it out alive and never have go to battle again but for ex-soldier they are forever wearing that hat and the memories it holds.

This tiny box may look insigificant but it holds great importance to the occupied people of Jersey. I did minimal cropping as I wanted the large amounts of background to emphasise the lack of awareness the world today has about rationing and although we aren’t experiencing war there are many families rationing. People below the poverty line are having to plan what they eat to see if they can afford it, some aren’t having enough food because they simply can’t afford it. During the occupation people were going through the same thing but not necessarily because of money but lack of access the Island had to food.

This is one of my favourite images from the shoot because of it’s minimalistic feel. In order to create this photo I went through a trial and error process to achieve this positioning of the book, first I had to upright but it sat at an odd angle and I struggled to keep it stagnant. I am planning on using this image for a photo-montage which is way I left some negative space above the book. I wanted to include the spine of the book because it’s what keeps it altogether which is symbolic of how people use diaries to express their emotions which can be a way of keeping your mental health in one stable piece.

I used an downwards angle to create this image, where I had to stand on a ladder to look through the lense, which makes it harder to centralise the object as accurately as possible. Although the image didn’t come out to be symmetrical, I liked the authenticity of it’s positioning. To me is reminded me of a scene on a movie where someone slams down the newspaper on the table and it lays at an skew angle until someone picks it up. Newspapers at the time were so important to people because other than the radio it was their only access to the news, so anyone who could afford it had it.

Matthew is an English artist, born in Nottingham, raised in a Dawn Christadephian family and is now bases in London. Collishaw’s work uses photography and video. He’s well known for his Bullet Hole which was taken in 1988, which is a closeup photo of what appears to be a bullet hole wound in the scalp of a person’s head, mounted on 15 light boxes. Collishaw took the original image from a pathology book that actually showed a wound caused by an ice pick . Mat got his debut when Bullet Hole was exhibited in Freeze, the group show organised by Damien Hirst in 1988 that launched the YBA (Young British Artists). It is now in the collection of the Museun of Old and New Art in Hobart, Australia. Mat has done many projects throughout his career but I one I am going to focus on is the still life exhibition named ‘Last Meal on Death Row’, which is pretty self explanatory.

This work of Collishaw’s is a depiction of Allen Lee Davis’ last meal, a lobster tail, fried potatoes, fried clams, fried shrimp, garlic bread and root beer. Davis was executed in Florida in 1999 as he was convicted of a brutal crime in 1982, he murdered Nancy Weller and her two young daughter, Kristina,nine ans Katherine, five, in Jacksonville, Florida. Karma caught up to him when the electric chair failed to deliver a clean death and witnesses heard him scream and saw him bleed. That was the last time the electric chair was used in the state of Florida and now only the lethal injection is allowed. The meal has been placed in a banquet looking way, like the last supper that Jesus held before he resurrected this emphasises the inevitable death of Davis. As well as that it is mutely lit and under-exposed as if there is no light left to give and there won’t be in hell. There is plenty of depth in the shadowing, this could represent the inner feelings of guilt, shame, regret or maybe even happiness going through the heads of the criminal on death row. His still-life resembles foodstuff painted by some Dutch artist in the age of the Vermeer. He takes a 1700s approach and matches it was a modern concept of the last meal but at the same time it goes with old times as the death penalty is seen by the large majority as an outdated punishment. The plate and the table look as if they are from a different century even the meal itself, I feel the underlining message could be that the death penalty should be abolished.

Autochrome is an early colour photographic process created by the Lumiere brothers in France in 1903. It was the main colour photographic process available to photographers until as late as the 1930s when Dufaycolour became popular. It consists of a glass plate coated on one side with microscopic grains of strach dyed red-orange, green and blue-violet, the grains act as colour filters. Lampback fills the spaces between grains and a black ans white panchromaticsilver halideemulsiom is coated on the top of the filter layer. The autochrome was loaded into the camera with the bare glass side facing the lens so that the light passed through the colour filters before reaching the photographic emulsion. The plate is processed to produce a positive transparency. Light, passing through the coloured starch grains, combines to recreate a full colour image of the original subject.

Unlike ordinary black-and-white plates, the Autochrome was loaded into the camera with the bare glass side facing the lens so that the light passed through the mosaic filter layer before reaching the emulsion. The use of an additional special orange-yellow filter in the camera was required to block ultraviolet light and restrain the effects of violet and blue light, parts of the spectrum to which the emulsion was overly sensitive. Because of the light loss due to all the filtering, Autochrome plates required much longer exposures than black-and-white plates and films, which meant that a tripod or other stand had to be used and that it was not practical to photograph moving subjects. The plate was reversal-processed into a positive transparency that is, the plate was first developed into a negative image but not “fixed”, then the silver forming the negative image was chemically removed, then the remaining silver halide was exposed to light and developed, producing a positive image.