“My work captures an awkwardness, but it’s also a celebration of some kind of beauty or empowerment.”
Michelle Sank was born in Cape Town, South Africa and moved to England in 1987 which is were she has been living till now. Sank has centred her work around topics such as socioeconomic diversity and growing up. Sank’s images explore the pressures and hopes of young people in suburban and coastal towns. Sank’s photographic gaze is highly inquisitive and non-judgmental due to her growing up during Apartheid. Sank describes her portraiture as a form of social documentary, she seeks to empower her subjects through their photographic experience with her.
Sixteen
Michelle Sanks ‘Sixteen’ project was focused on tenneragers lives while growing up in the UK, she used a questionnaire and portraits to show the person who she was interviewing as well as hand written answers which I felt gave the project a lot more depth. Throughout the different questionnaires Sank asked multiple different questions changing with each person, but the first question always stayed the same “What does sixteen mean to you?”.
Sank what to explore the meaning of Sixteen and wanted to answer her own question of ‘what is it like to be sixteen years old in the UK now?’. This project was a joint exhibit where some of the UK’s foremost documentary portrait photographs collaborated in opening conversations with young people about their hopes and fears, who or what sustains them. The photographers wanted to give these young people a voice and to have them heard by the bigger world. Michelle Sank focused around Cornwall as she was interested in exploring how the economic poverty and physical isolation of the county impacts the future of its young people. Sank chose to work in areas such as Camborne, Falmouth, Penzance and Treneere. Sank stated that she felt ‘privileged’ by the connections she was able to make which her subjects, their families and guardians who had shared their stories with her. She also got a closer look into their social and family structures and their domestic surroundings. This helped Sank to have a better understanding of the social challenges that people face which are hidden.
Image Analysis
I have chosen to use this portrait and questionnaire as it was one of the less detailed but also i feel that it was still able to convey an insightful message into what being sixteen in the the UK is really like. Compared to some other answers people might see this and think that its to simple and not a lot of meaning, but with reading the answers you are able to see how an adolescent thinks when answering meaningful questions such as these. The young man doesnt go into much detail but in his answers to some he allowed a little bit of his past to show through, such as the third question where he writes about his Father. He also writes about his girlfriend which shows the view slightly more to his story outside of the portrait. I think that the image Sank used was about to portray an accurate representation of how sixteen year olds act with their friends. I liked that it wasn’t a simple head on shot with just the subject, this allowed Sank to mix up her photographs and create different impressions for each individual.