How do I feel about my final outcomes?

Overall, I am happy with my outcomes for this project as I feel that I was able to access a range of techniques and styles to build up a portfolio that will reflect my various talents in different fields of portraiture. I enjoy the more documentary style imagery and I feel like I was able to explore this on a few occasions over the past few weeks. Additionally, I was able to experiment with studio photography which was fairly new to me and I have created outcomes that I am proud of. I think that there were certainly improvements that could have been made across this project, and sometimes my plans were not executed as I would have liked, however I can say that I have also created work that was really successful.

What areas were the strongest/weakest?

I think that my strongest work is from studio shoots (the best shown below) as well as my environmental photoshoot with Ryan Hervé.

I am also really happy with my environmental portrait series from the Central Market in St Helier as it was my first experience of asking to photograph strangers and I think the outcomes were really worthwhile.

The weaker areas from this project I think are from my school photoshoot as they are not lit well and just not very successful technically.

I also feel that there were a lot of photos taken in studio shoots that were mistakes or not successful because I was not fully knowledgeable on how to operate the equipment and lighting. I do however recognise that this was part of the learning process as I soon became much better at this.

Were my images successful in relation to my chosen artist references?

I think that, as I was unfortunately not able to work from every one of my artist references, I was not entirely successful in any endeavours to create work that is clearly inspired by my chosen artists’ work. The most successful photoshoots with regards to artist references were, in my opinion, my Sam Contis shoot, my self portrait shoot (inspired by Nilupa Yasmin), and my Justine Kurland inspired shoot (with this one there were images that could also be likened to the work of Michelle Sank/Doug Dubois). The reason I think that these were more successful than others is because I thought about my references and thought a little more about the meaning behind the artists’ work as I was taking my images. My artist comparisons can be found here. I definitely think I could have worked harder to produce images that were more similar to my artists’ work, through more thoughtful choices in either setting, costume, or lighting, and perhaps by taking more time to go out on multiple shoots.

Overall comments

On the whole, I am pleased with my outcomes but feel that I could have worked harder and been more confident in my choices. I think the reason my ideas were not executed as well as I had hoped was because I did not take the time to plan and review my artist references to a sufficient standard before taking my images. I took too long to come up with ideas in the beginning, perhaps due to a lack of personal inspiration, and I think this was my biggest error on the Identity project. However, I have managed to produce some work that I am really proud of, especially with regards to the idea of environmental portraiture.