For my personal study, I have chosen to create a project based off Vienna Bakery, but more specifically how it came into my family and how it’s been a large part of my life growing up. I have a lot of nostalgia surrounding the bakery, as I live next to the bakery, over the years, I have seen, employees come and go and there are some that have been there since before I was born, my old neighbour even used to work there. Most of my family members in Jersey have worked or work there, making it massive part of my childhood. I would like to focus in on this for this project because I’ve always been around the bakery growing up, my mum being a manager at the bakery and me, now, working in the shop, selling products, growing up in the Vienna Bakery community has definitely shaped me as a person, whether that’s by knowing the people working there over the years or just by more recent events like working as a sales assistant in the shop in the Central Market shop. 

My plan is to talk to and take images of people who work at the Bakery now, more specifically the long-term and more important members of staff, take images of different popular products and take images of both premises (Rue des Pres and the Central Market) using photography styles inspired by photographers like Michelle Sank, Mitch Epstein, August Sander, and David Goldblatt. I hope to use multiple styles of photography, not just sticking to one, but doing a mix of still life, portraits and landscapes. I would also like to use a mixture of documentary style images and staged images, showing the bakery during normal working times as well as specifically styled images. Taking inspiration from Mitch Epstein’s project “Family Business”, I hope to interview my mum’s cousin and owner of Vienna Bakery David Dodge and his daughter and the recently appointed director of the company Sarah Dodge. I hope to present this project within a photo book with stills of the interviews and text, quoting what’s said during each interview.  

I want to explore my experience being “homeless” at 17, as this was a period where I experienced a drastic change to my entire way of life, and when I feel I developed a lot as a person and learned to cope with these changes as a result. This period matters a lot to me and I feel that expressing this in my own work could help me process the rest of the situation that I haven’t yet dealt with. I wish to develop this project through photographs I took both while homeless and through staged recreations in a photobook.

My own experience of being homeless felt more freeing than anything, as I wasn’t tied down by people or other commitments, which I honestly look back on with nostalgia, although the conditions, and some incidents, were awful. After speaking with people who’ve had a similar situation, it seems to be a usual feeling that people experience in the first few weeks, before the reality settles in. I don’t particularly have a focus on certain moments or places in mind, but I want to create a rough narrative following what I did and where I went to find someplace to stay. Whilst I want to discuss the freedom I felt with the whole situation, I also want to go into the risks and complications of living on the streets in somewhere like the UK. I spent a short while of my time homeless living in the back of a friend’s run-down old land rover in one of the most dangerous council estates in his area, where I’d sometimes wake up to sirens, glass breaking, fights, and on one occasion I woke up to a man staring at me through the windows. These sorts of things often made it harder to sleep at night, as the land rover was my only relatively safe place to stay, and it wasn’t fixed enough to move.

Two photographers I could look at for this projects are Theo Gosselin and Jim Goldberg. Gosselin explores the sense of freedom and adventure that a lot of young people need to experience, through his own travelling in a campervan – his use of a more vintage look in his image is what’s so attractive about his work to me. Goldberg, looking at his photobook ‘Raised by Wolves,’ focuses on American children raised in extremely poor conditions, and what they suffer through just to survive. This raw, unforgiving portrayal of a situation that was far worse than anything I’d experienced is what draws me to his work, which could be something I aspire to recreate in my personal study. I could also blend the two styles together, creating nostalgic, idealised images that almost euphemise the horrors of having no shelter, whilst also highlighting the freedom that comes with no commitments.

I could also research homelessness statistics around the world and the UK, or maybe just for each city or town that I was in.

what is nostalgia:

Nostalgia is a word that we use to describe how we feel when we think about different memories from things like photographs , childhood or places etc from past experiences. We usually associate nostalgia with happiness, warmth and comforting thoughts rather than ones that make us feel sad. I think that many people like the feeling of nostalgia even if it were to make them emotional as it is normally because of how fast time goes and is almost bittersweet rather than upsetting. Nostalgia can be about many different things from things like tv shows that we used to watch or food that we ate when we were growing up to things that we saw on walk or phrases we said. I think that nostalgia is such a vars topic that can be inter-rotated in many different forms for different people, however, we all gain that similar heart warming feeling when experiencing it.

mood board:

mind map: