On Monday the 7th of June we visited the jersey museum on its last day hosting its exhibition ‘people make jersey’, a exhibit exploring the culture of our island and hoe immigration has shaped it. Being a decedent of potato farmers from Brittany and Normandy I was especially interested in the immigration patterns of French immigrants who were economic migrants looking to find work in Jerseys world famous potato industry. This display has inspired me to delve deeper into my heritage. After questioning my granny I found out that my great-great grandparents had moved from Normandy from her mum’s side and Brittany from her dads side, to Jersey the early 20th century to look for work potato farming. They would have had identity cards similar to the ones on display in the museum due to the timings of them coming to the island and would have been thought of as ‘Aliens’
We were later taken on a walk around town by Shannon. to take photos of whatever we felt fit with the idea of Jersey culture. I took lots of photos of Jersey building, especially of interesting looking doors and intricate decorative pieces on corners of buildings. Shannon took us out of our comfort zones and got us to go up to random people on the street and ask to take their portrait. This was really nerve-wracking but I’m glad we did it as the photos i got from it are amazing and really well expose the theme of culture mixed in the immigration. With my newfound confidence from these photos I attempted some street photography, a topic we have already done in photography which I felt really uncomfortable with at the time.
In editing
I took over 450 photos on this shoot which made my selection process really difficult as I had so many to go through. Because of this however I had much more choice so was able to get better quality photos. I did my selection process on light room and was able to compare my similar images side by side to choose the best one, which made the selection process much easier.
A large part of my own culture and identity is based around food. To my family it is very important to meet regularly to eat drink and talk so I decided to capture that and photograph one of our family meals. This meal was inherently jersey. As an island we are blessed with beautiful fresh seafood at a decent price so the meal we had featured jersey crab and oysters as well as other shellfish and jersey royal potato’s.
I am really pleased with these photos, I love the insight they provide on my family but I feel like I could have improved the photos of my grandad preparing the food to include more of his face and make it more portrait based. I did 2 selections to find my favourite images and then edited them as I saw fit. Some of the photos I put different black and white filters on to create a more dramatic looking image whilst others I used matte filters to make them look more aesthetically pleasing
I returned to my grandparents house for another photoshoot, this time of my granny making bean crock. Bean crock, or ‘les pais au fou’ is a traditional jersey dish similar to a Norman cassolette. The ingredients are varied per household but my granny’s recipe uses pork (as well as the traditional pork trotter) jersey beans, and onion cooked overnight in the traditional jersey crock pot. The dish may look a little unappetising but its really delicious and is an important part of jersey culture. I had to take the photos on two consecutive days as the bean crock has to cook overnight.
I decided to edit my photos into black and white because bean crock is such an old dish and the black and white connotes that old feeling. After completing my photoshoot I told her more about the project and how we had seen immigrants alien cards at the museum on our trip. On hearing this she went upstairs and found her grandmother’s own alien registration card as well as other documentation and old photos
