My main inspiration for this photoshoot is Justine Kurland’s ‘Girl Pictures’ book. I believe that this book defines feminism very well due to every photo being very unique and capturing different types of people.

Justine Kurland’s main inspiration for this book was from a young girl in which Justine used to date her father. The girl was sent to live with her father after her mother kicked her out for skipping school and doing drugs. Justine then formed the idea of a photoshoot based on ‘alyssum as a teenage runaway’. In which she scouted for models outside various high schools. She also gained inspiration from a TV show about the tales of teenage delinquency.

Justine Kurland’s Girl pictures bring a sense or nostalgia. Every girl in each photo have their own story however come together to live a similar lifestyle. They live without a care in the world, and are truly living their teenage years. Therefore, many of the images in Girl Pictures were taken outside in locations that feel desolate or easy to overlook. They were often staged under bridges or beyond fences or on the sides of highways; places that feel synonymous with warnings.

Image Analysis:

In Justine Kurland’s image, Femininity is shown throughout by a topless girl standing in front of the mirror. This is a defining aspect of the image as it is the anatomy in which all girls have, however, many people view this as being provocative and vulnerable in front of a camera. However, Kurland has composed this image so that you are unable to see the camera and is

Whereas Justine Kurland portrays this image as empowering, as the subject has confidence within her own body to show it off . Another aspect within this image is the bright pink hand soap on the top of the sink counter top which is accompanied by a girl sat near it with a glossy pink magazine which she is reading. Femininity is shown further through the girl sat on the bathroom floor next to a bag which is spewing out with clothes, who looks like she is having trouble picking out her outfit. the image seems to have been taken at dusk due to the orange light shining through the window of the bathroom. However, the bathroom is light up very bright from the lights in the ceiling and above the mirror.

Celestial Echoes- Bye-Bye Baby- By Michelle Sank

Another artist that I have taken inspiration from is Michelle Sank , with her photo series ‘bye-bye baby’ and ‘Celestial Echoes’. These images deal with the notion of developing adulthood within the British society today. Bye-Bye Baby is exploring the way young boys and girls interpret their understanding of masculinity and femininity. Having left the purity of their childhood worlds, they seem to take on the trappings of the grown ups they mimic and the status set out in popular culture and the media. Celestial Echoes continues with this theme looking at this phenomenon within older adolescent girls.

Image Analysis:

The image above by Celestial Echoes is untitled, however, I think this is a very effective image which captures youth and femininity very well. In the foreground of the image, there is a young girl looking down at the camera which creates a sense of power. The lighting in the picture seems to be natural, but there is more light coming in from the left shown through the highlighting of the outer corner of her eye and the shadow which is created from her nose on her right eye. Celestial Echoes has also added bokeh (blurring) to the background which was most likely done by changing her aperture of her camera. Femininity is also shown through the young boys in the background of the image. By placing the girl in the foreground of the picture she can be viewed as more powerful, whereas the boys are perceived as smaller and less important.

MOODBOARD

STATEMENT OF INTENT

Our personal study project is based around the theme of nostalgia. Nostalgia is defined as ‘a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past.’ My interpretation of the theme nostalgia in my personal study, is going to be based on exploring my Polish heritage, and how my family in Poland applies to my own sense of nostalgia. Furthermore I will contrast this to my life with my family here, in Jersey. I will be using Realism, within Typology and artist’s such as Hilla and Bernd Becher in order to present my life through photography. In the book August Sander Face of Our Time by Alfred Doblin Sander says ‘Each of us knows a number of people, and we recognize them when we meet by specific entirely personal characteristics that they have. All the people we encounter are only individuals, and each person has a name as well as specific, unrepeatable, and characteristic token of identification’ this supports my personal study by showing my identity and nostalgia through my family.

The main purpose of my project is to take photograph’s of my family neighbourhood, this is to highlight the nostalgic feeling I have towards my family. This will include taking images of their houses and portrait’s of my family members. I will be taking documentary style images, some of my photos will be taken with flash, as I will be attending a family gathering in Poland which gives me an opportunity to take pictures. I will take pictures of the setting and surroundings where the dinner will take place, perhaps I will be able to find some objects that are significant to my family as well as images of my family during the dinner. Here I will also try to and take headshot portraits of my family members, inside and perhaps outside their house depending on the natural lighting, as I will not be using artificial lighting.

Realism within Typology is what I am referencing my project to. The term ‘realism’ can mean to depict things as they are, without idealising or making abstract. This will be presented by my documentary photography that I will take. As well as taking images of my family neighbourhood, I will aspire to also take images of the town I live in, Konstantynow Lodzki. Here I will try to take images of small landmarks that can be used as filler images in the book.

I will develop my project into a book form. This is so it can highlight each documentary image and tell a story through the layout of a book. I am yet to decide whether the images will be in colour or black and white, once the images are taken I will decide. However I’m more interested in colour, I will edit my images in Adobe Lightroom Classic. Within the book I will alternate between portraits and images of people and landmarks and place either in Poland or Jersey. In Jersey I will take images in places that are significant to me. I however won’t be adding any text within the book as my intention is for the images to speak for themselves.

MINDMAP OF IDEAS FOR PERSONAL STUDY:

MINDMAP OF IDEAS FOR PERSONAL STUDY:

Jim Goldberg, an American artist and photographer, is known for his work with marginalised communities. His photography, particularly his photobook ‘Raised By Wolves‘, reflects the neglect and abuse these struggling communities face, and how they as people respond to it in an unforgivingly realistic and direct manner. I want my personal study to portray a similar feeling, through images of people I’ve met travelling and while I was homeless, the main difference being that it reflects more my own perception of them, and what they did to help or support me.

Goldberg’s iconic style features monochrome portraits accompanied with handwritten texts from his subjects, telling Sean O’Hagan in 2009, “There’s a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness, the photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them.” This means that Goldberg’s work is more about being an observer of this suffering than a narrator, almost. It turns his images into a more personal account of each subject, allowing them to narrate their own stories, while Goldberg just provides them with a platform and the means to do so. I find this idea to be intriguing, although it wouldn’t necessarily work for this project as a lot of the people I was with I am unable to currently get in contact with them for one reason or another.

Goldberg states his photobooks, ‘Rich and Poor‘, ‘Raised by Wolves‘, and ‘Candy‘, as part of a trilogy, “All three books are about where I grew up, and how I grew up. The books represent a lot of the same themes about race, class, age, love, lust, betrayal–they’re tied together.” He told Magnum Photos. Similarly, I want this to be an underlying theme in my own work, that I create a narrative that hints at how I myself have lived and grown up, whether using subtlety or being direct.

Sources

https://jimgoldberg.com/

https://www.dobedorepresents.com/artists/jim-goldberg

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/03/jim-goldberg-rich-and-poor-photography

https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/art/jim-goldberg-raised-by-wolves/

https://www.magnumphotos.com/theory-and-practice/fingerprint-tracing-roots-jim-goldbergs-raised-by-wolves/

Michelle Sank

Bio

Michelle Sank was born in South Africa and currently resides in the UK. She is a documentary photographer whose work explores contemporary social issues. Her photographs have been exhibited and published extensively in the UK, Europe, Australia and Mexico, South Africa and the U.S.A. Her imagery is held in the permanent collections of Allan Servais, Brussels, Open Eye Gallery Archive, Liverpool, Société Jersiaise and Guernsey Museum, Channel Islands. She has undertaken numerous commissions for prominent galleries and magazines in Europe and the USA and her work has won awards in prestigious competitions including the National Portrait Gallery and the British Journal of Photography. Sank has four published books, The Water’s Edge – Women on the Waterfront; Becoming – a major monograph featuring her youth portraits taken over five years; The Submerged about the landscape and inhabitants of Aberystwyth, Wales and My.Self about the cultural identity amongst diverse young people in the Black Country. Sank’s work tends to be themed around certain groups of people for example, people who live in her neighbourhood like in her project Breathe or local workers in a certain region like in her project Insula. Most of the time, her images are environmental portraits, on the rare occasion that they aren’t, they are just of the surrounding area of the subject and not the person.

Her Work

As I can’t talk about all her photo projects, I will just mention some of my favourites by her

1. Insula

“Insula eschews a specific brief though the work responds to the wealth of nineteenth century portrait photographs within the Jersey Photographic Archive that it now joins as a powerful point of interpretation. The beguiling qualities of these new photographs call to mind the position that Lewis Baltz found for photographic series, ‘somewhere between the novel and film.’ As such, Sank’s photographs offer a visual poem to the island” – Gareth Syvret

I will be taking a lot of inspiration from this project as the style of photography is part of what I would like to do during my personal study. The main image style being portraits really says a lot, I think she wanted to show what the people of the island look like, more specifically in their places of work.

2. Sixteen

“What is it like to be sixteen years old in the UK now? This is the central thread running through the national project Sixteen where some of the UK’s foremost documentary portrait photographers collaborated in opening up conversations with young people about their hopes and fears, and who or what sustains them, giving prominence to voices rarely heard.” – Sank on the project

This project is one of my favourites as it focuses in on people who are around my age, showing their experiences of growing up in an isolated place, which I can relate to from living on an island for my entire life.

3. Bye-Bye Baby/Celestial Echoes

These images deal with the notion of developing adulthood within the milieu of British society today. In Bye-Bye Baby I am exploring the way young boys and girls interpret their understanding of masculinity and femininity. Having left the purity of their childhood worlds, they seem to take on the trappings of the grown ups they mimic and of the status quo as set out in popular culture and the media. Celestial Echoes continues with this theme looking at this phenomenon within older adolescent girls.

Image Analysis

In this image, the use of natural daylight is intentional, Sank is trying to show the subjects in the most natural way possible, whilst still having light on them, even the girl in the background of the image has light on her. Continuing on from this, even if the girl in the background is slightly blurred, you can still see her and her emotions. For me, I naturally get drawn, visually, to the girl in the background, I think the lighting in this part of the image is more visually appealing, I however do understand why the girl in the foreground of the image is there, she has a more “domineering” aura, it’s almost as if she had asked Sank to put her in the foreground of the image. Contextually, I think the two girls in the image could be sisters, I think the one in the background could often be overshadowed by the other one, making me believe that she could be the younger one, however their ways of dressing contrast this, the one in the foreground looks as though she could be the younger of the two based on her way of dressing, the one in the background is dressed much more conservatively, just a hoodie and jeans, whereas the girl in the foreground is dressed much more “out-there”, wearing a colourful skirt and top. Out of the two, the girl in the background seems to be more mature. About this project, Michelle Sank said “Having left the purity of their childhood worlds, they seem to take on the trappings of the grown ups they mimic and of the status quo as set out in popular culture and the media.” In my opinion, this image presents this ideology and statement very well.

• For my project I want to focus on youth, focusing on friendships, friendship groups, love, and freedom to link with the aspect of nostalgia and memories liked with them. This matters to me as friendships are a massive part of my life especially growing up on a small island where sometimes there is not much to do so we try to discover unfamiliar places and when we find them, we create new memories there which link to the place. I wish to develop this project by extending the number of photos I have and diving more closely into my friend’s life’s and what it means to them to be in a friend group, what they think a friendship is and what memories they have linking with friendship.
• I would like to explore the idea of creating a magazine or a hard back book to present my work. I will start my study by selecting and editing my photos which I already have and start taking and collecting more photos. The main focus of my project is going to be portraiture and some photos of landscape because it links with my view of nostalgia; as places links with memories, if possible,.
• My photographs will be taken outside using natural lighting with some being taken inside with a flash. The images are going to be in a documentary style looking at teenagers’ life and friendship on a small island and discovering the joy of friendships and what they men to people.
• the presentation of my book will be easy to follow, the images will be edited on lightroom classic; however, I do not want to manipulate the images in a drastic way I would like them to still look authentic I would just like to enhance the images to make them more eye-catching. To create the magazine, I will be using blurb to create the layout and pages. 

The theme for the personal study is ‘Nostalgia’. Nostalgia is about a sentimentality for the past. It’s a sentimental yearning for return to a past period. The feeling of nostalgia is often triggered by a familiar smell, sound, or keepsake. So, I want to centre my focus around my childhood and upbringing, while also acknowledging my heritage. I want to do this as I believe this will communicate a sense of self and allow me to explore and piece together aspects of my ancestry unfamiliar to me.

By taking inspiration from previous projects (home, identity, etc) I will be taking portraits of family and photographs of significant objects, as well as occasional landscapes. These will be accompanied by some images from my family archives, to show my early childhood as well as my heritage which are relevant. I’ll include photographs of my family and pictures of me in Madeira when I was little. My personal study will explore my dual nationality, portraying both my English and Madeiran heritage from each of my parents. I want to gather a collection of meaningful photographs while in Madeira over the Christmas holidays, capturing familiar landscapes from trips when I was younger, like family homes for example. I’ll also capture pictures of family, street photography, environmental portraits, etc in a documentary-type style.

I will be presenting my project in the form of a photobook. This allows me to establish a storyline throughout the series of images, and show the progression of my life. This will create the story of my identity, showing both sides of my family, to capture the essence of having my dual heritage. While leaning into my dad’s side of the family, to explore and attempt to portray what Madeiran identity/culture looks and feels like. This is important to me as, living in Jersey, I am far away from my family and do not visit them often.