I want to explore the story of my dad’s long and continued relationship with the sea and surfing. I will focus on how it has impacted his life and relationships as a whole, as well as my own life as his daughter.

This subject is important to me because it is essentially the reason I am here, because my parents met when my mum learned to surf and my dad was her instructor. For this reason, my whole family has been involved with the sport ever since and it affects my life every day.

I plan to ask my dad questions about how he started surfing, what draws him to it everyday, and how he feels about the sport. I will also use archived images from family albums from my dad’s life in Newquay as a young surfer and then from my parent’s history together.

I would like to present this project as a photobook because I feel this is the most professional way for me to present my work.

I think I will begin my study by collating old images from my parent’s history to allow me to gauge the kind of material I have available and perhaps inspire my later images.

This will relate to nostalgia as it will explore my own childhood, which was spent mostly in the sea, as well as my parent’s nostalgia of when they met.

The portraits I intend to take of my dad as a surfer will be in the environmental portraiture style, although I think they will be a mixture of candid and posed images. I will also be taking images of our garage, which is full to the brim with an extensive collection of surfboards and wetsuits which my dad is constantly adding to. I could also combine this with studio images of items I found at the beach and collected as a child. I have a lot of these kind of items so this would be fairly easy to do.

I will not be able to use the studio to photograph my dad so I will either photograph him in the house, out at the beach, in the garage, or at his work as a meteorologist.

I plan to present the archive images alongside the newer images to show the differences in my dad’s lifestyle since he was younger, but also to highlight the considerable similarities. I think this is interesting as surfing can often be viewed as something done by young people, especially when done multiple times a day, however my dad does not follow this pattern. As a 49 year old father, he often finds the time to go surfing more than once a day which is quite uncommon I think. His choice of shift work over a 9-5 means that he has the ability to support this lifestyle and always find time for his hobbies.

I will accompany my images with the questions I ask my dad and then the answers that he gives.

I do not think I will choose to manipulate my images, however I will be editing them to create a more professional look but as this is an exploration of character, I think a more authentic look is important.