What you want to explore?

As much as I love Jersey and the people in my life right now, I still feel like I don’t belong here. I’d like to focus on my own culture and family and explore what it’s like being an immigrant. I want to explore why and how my family has migrated from one place to another, as well as explore how it has affected them.

Why it matters to you?

It’s my past and I think that is important because everything that has happened to me and my family is what shaped me into the person I am today. I feel very disconnected from my own culture and I feel like I don’t belong anywhere (could also be because I have moved so much from a young age) and I wish this will help me understand myself better.

How you wish to develop your project?

I wish to develop my project by looking at mum’s private archive and possibly recreating images from her teen years just to see the difference between life in Romania in the 90s and life in Jersey in the 2020s. I will also look for documents that we have from when we first moved to Jersey that show our status. I will mostly focus on self portraits and environmental portraits of my mum (possibly at her work place) as well as maybe other immigrant people. I own a little Sony digital camera that I take with me everywhere I go and document everything, so I think I could also use the pictures on that as they are mostly of me, my mum and my friends (showing my life as an immigrant in Jersey basically). I will present my project in the form of a photo-book.

When and where you intend to begin your study?

I’m thinking of starting my project in the next 2 weeks or so because I still need more ideas. I’ll start by talking to my mum about her experience and look through our photo albums in order to get an idea of the type of shoots I’ll have to plan. Around Christmas time will be the best time to photograph for my project because every year we invite people (Romanian, Polish and Portuguese) over for dinner which shows a sense of community. I could photograph the types of foods we will have, which will also show how we Europeans celebrate Christmas and how that could be different from people that are from Jersey.