This was my first photoshoot down at the harbour in which I planned to try and get some images similar to those of Stratos and Michael Marten- however I timed my visit wrong as it was actually low tide, and the ferry which I wanted to shoot wasn’t in port.
I did however successfully capture the first part of a piece I’m planning on doing inspired by Marten, in which I want to show the dramatic change in the tide by capturing images before and after the tide has come in.
My images
Michael Marten’s Work
I will be returning to capture the after image when the tide is right and the weather is similar to the original image in order to achieve similar lighting.
We did this photoshoot inspired by early 17th-century styles of photography. Still-life “art” can be a celebration of the material joys of life, or conversely a memento mori, expressing the temporality of human life and material pleasures. The wonderful thing about still-life art is that depending on the objects and the cultural contexts they draw from, each still-life art form will take on a unique meaning. Still-life art has existed from the 17th century until the modern-day, but in the 19th century, artists adopted photography as a new medium for still-life art, to express their concepts in a novel format, and thus the still-life photo was born.
We used the photography studio to take a variety of still-life images of objects relating to the ‘My Rock’ project such as rocks, shells, seaweed, etc we could combine with previous photoshoots later on. We used two different types of lighting (flashed lighting and still lighting) alongside varying backgrounds in order to experiment with the intensity of the lights and accentuate the quality of each image along with pairing each object composition with a backdrop that would allow the details the emerge within the image- essentially giving the subjects a stage.
A sentence: I will explore the sense of family and migration through my own culture and my mother’s life.
A paragraph: In my photobook I will explore the sense of family and migration through my own mother by showing what it was living in Romania in the early 90s compared to my life in the UK in the 2020s. I will be using a series of portraits of me and/or my mother, as well as images from her photographic archive (photo albums). I’m going to also interview her and find out what it was like moving away from her own country and settling to Jersey, then I’ll add the text to some of the images to tie everything together.
Design your photobook:
I’d like my book to have a hardback cover and either be black & white, or have a neutral/muted colour because I don’t want it to be too distracting. I really liked Laia Abril’s front cover in the book ‘Epilogue’, and I might try do something similar with my mother. It will be in an A4 size and portrait, as it is easier to hold and store that way. The title is going to be formed of only 2 or 3 words, or a short sentence, that will capture the viewer’s eye. I want to write my title on a piece of cloth then stick it on the front cover, just like in Sam Harris’ book ‘The Middle of Somewhere’, in order to give the book more personality and texture.
I want the opening page of the book to have a map of Europe which I will edit and show our journey of migration from Romania to Europe, just like Dragana Jurisic’s ‘YU: The Lost Country’. The layout inside the book will be quite simple with mostly some double spreads and occasional juxta positions of the past and present. I’d also like to add some text on some pages in which I’ll either translate some Romanian writing found on the images, or my mother’s own words.
I really liked the use of inserts from Sam Harris’ book ‘The Middle of Somewhere’ and I think I might do something similar with some journal pages I have found relating to migration and wanting to go back “home”.
Mood-board
Where Mimosa Bloom by Rita Puig-Serra CostaThe Middle of Somewhere by Sam HarrisYU: The Lost Country by Dragana JurišićWhere Mimosa Bloom by Rita Puig-Serra CostaThe Epilogue by Laia Abril
