I put together a large collection of over 400 images from the last few years on my travels, along with some from recent photoshoots I’d done in preparation.
As I was dealing with quite literally hundreds of images, and still a good 150 after selecting which ones I could use for my photobook, I wanted to set out a baseline aesthetic for each image; prioritising a warmer colour palette and low contrast, which I achieved through colour grading and changing the input level of blacks to roughly 23 on the tone curve. These settings were then synced and adjusted accordingly on each image.
Afterward, I sorted through which of the remaining images I wanted to keep, and were actually usable for the narrative I wanted to portray in my photobook. I was left with roughly 40 images that I then put into an order, starting briefly with my parents house and my room there, showing an image of a friend walking through a street in Jersey on a double page spread. The idea of being stuck in Jersey is a reoccurring motif throughout the book, after each collection of images from a trip away, either to Spain where my grandfather lives, or to the UK where I’m seeing friends, I still end up back in Jersey. The imagery from Spain reflects on my relationship with my grandfather and my time spent living there, and how it differs from Jersey, whilst the imagery from the UK reflects on the people I meet and my perception of them. Whilst I wanted the book to capture a sense of nostalgia, I also break this on the occasion and take a focus on the loss of different people I’ve met, whether they’ve passed away or we’ve lost contact through one way or another, which I feel grounds the narrative more in reality.
I drew up a rough version of the tattoo on my back – a lotus flower- to put on the cover. I experimented with different ways of doing the cover; using handwritten text on a white background, down the spine etc., but it didn’t fit the aesthetic of the rest of the book.
I came up with the title finding home, as the book surrounds concepts of self-searching and freedom, and finding a place to call home has always been a personal struggle of mine. I put the drawing of the lotus flower over the cover as a graphic, lowering the transparency, and finding a nice caramel colour that emulated the warmth and nostalgia from the images in the book itself. I also experimenting with using handwritten text from paper that was scanned in, but ultimately it became too big a job, and it would look more authentic to write it on the copy that I order.
3 words – Displacement, maturing, self-exploration
Sentence – Following my personal growth as I search for a place and people that I can call home, whilst figuring out my own place in the world.
Paragraph – A narrated account of my own search for a place to call home and the people that I met whilst doing so. It’s a documentation of my own travels contrasted with the dullness of being stuck living in one very small place, and my desire to be anywhere else.
Design
– Photobook Press
For the book itself I want to use a hardcover with some kind of imagery that’s used as a motif. I want the book to feel more like a personal album than anything else, although it might be difficult to replicate that.
I’m not too sure on the type of paper or ink that I want to use, but I think a matte finish on the pages would suit it better as opposed to something glossier.
I don’t want the book to be too big either, but I want it to be more landscape-oriented as I will then have room to place some double page spreads with landscape images and space for a few diptychs or triptychs with portrait images, and maybe some negative space to write around or even on the photographs.
For my book’s title, I have a few ideas, but it’s something I’ll have to decide as the book develops. The first title I thought of is “Days Gone By“, as it reflects the nostalgic element of the book and the growing struggles within my own life. Secondly, my other title idea is “Finding Home“, as I feel that that is my goal within the self-searching and displacement within the book, and it feels more topical.
– Jim Goldberg, Raised by Wolves
I want the editing of my photos to follow a more linear narrative, presenting my movements back and forth from place to place, as I also feel it might show more development in my technical skills within each image, as some date back to as early as 2021. Additionally, like Jim Goldberg’s “Raised by Wolves“, I want to insert handwritten text onto most of the pages and imagery, that provides context to push the narrative forward, without giving every detail. To do this, I want to write in an extremely blunt manner, using only lowercase letters and relatively short sentences.
“My only agenda is to bring attention to otherwise ignored and shunned lives.” -Jim Goldberg
Young people are the future of our societies, and our world. Before they can fully thrive and grow to both replace and exceed the work their ancestors dedicated their lives to, positive, nurturing environments must first be fostered. In order for this to happen, countless laws have been established across the world to protect and support young children, but, try as they might, plenty still fall through the cracks and are left to fend for themselves. As a result of this, general ideologies and attitudes toward young people shift among older generations, garnering them a negative reputation that can sometimes stop them from looking for the help that they need, and only worsening the problem. Photographers such as Jim Goldberg and Mike Brodie challenge this representation, providing them with a platform to where they can tell their own stories and be represented more fairly, and so that they can be understood. In this essay, I will discuss how both these artists portray young people, and how I find myself relating to it from my own experiences.
Jim Goldberg’s 1995 photobook, “Raised by Wolves”, is a compilation of various mixed media, including handwritten notes, transcripts of conversations, drawings, and photographs composed over the course of a decade. Through these different mediums, Goldberg builds a collage of fragments of his subject’s lives and experiences, revealing their dreams, behaviours and struggles piece by piece. A particular narrative focus of the book is the relationship between “Tweeky Dave” and “Echo”, two runaways living on the streets of California, which Goldberg intimately captures through each page. Despite this, Goldberg himself considers the project a “work of narrative fiction” as opposed to photojournalism, as he often had found that some of the people he’d met had lied about their backgrounds or lives in some way or another, dubbing them more as “half-truths”. He portrays the unforgiving reality of mental health and drug abuse in these characters lives, a global issue that is still growing today even in the UK, with a reported approximately 3.1 million people using some form of banned substance in the last twelve months (March 2023), and roughly 1.1 million people using class A drugs.
Jim Goldberg – Raised by Wolves
In the above image, a page taken from Goldberg’s photobook, two images of a young man’s teeth and his stomach with his shirt lifted up are shown, with some handwritten text in the negative space. The man’s teeth look to be jagged and in poor health, his stomach bears a large scar rising from below his jeans to his lower chest, and his clothing resembles that of the punk subculture, from the denim jacket, the jeans, the effigy of a middle finger attached to his belt loop, and what little can be seen of his t-shirt, that seems to represent a band. The writing can be assumed to belong to the man depicted in the imagery, stating, “I’m Dave who the fuck are you” and “You need me 2 feel superior I need you 2 laugh at”. Immediately from these given context clues, it’s understood that Dave has grown up in poor circumstances that seem to have left him both physically and mentally scarred, suggested by his cynical attitude in the provided text and the accompanying imagery. In the photographs themselves, the composition is entirely focused on the man. In the image of his teeth, Dave can be seen grinning, whilst the background is completely unfocused and unintelligible. His lips have black marks on them, potentially from a habit of picking them or as a result of a fight on the streets. His skin appears dry and flaky, which could result from both poor skin care and sun overexposure, and his teeth are chipped and seem to be decaying heavily. Dave’s mouth is centred in the composition, taken from a 45-degree angle, creating more shadows and adding depth to his features. In the second image, he stands with his hands on his hips, suggesting his confidence as a person despite his struggles, proudly displaying his scar almost like a badge of honour. This displays the brutal abuse and neglect Dave has faced over the course of his life, but also suggests that he takes pride in his ability to survive these horrors. His excessive use of personal language – such as “I’m” “me” “I” – in his handwriting featured on the page hints to his feeling alone in his survival, feeling ostracised and isolated by others for one reason or another; despite knowing and being around others in similar situations.
Jim Goldberg – Raised by Wolves
“I wasn’t satisfied with just being this young punk kid roaming aimlessly taking pretty pictures.” – Mike Brodie
Mike Brodie’s 2013 photobook, “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity”, follows his own raw experience of train-hopping across the United States in his youth, meeting other runaways that had a similar burning desire to find themselves and be free. Brodie’s execution of this focuses almost entirely on brief moments of intense emotion and intimacy that are entirely up to the viewer’s own interpretation. The rawness that emanates from his imagery derives from his then-inexperienced eye for photography; Brodie had no concern for composition, just a need to capture his experiences as they were, a factor often missing from professional photography.
Brodie captures a first-hand desire for freedom that presents itself unmatched to other photographers; his experience was his life, not just a small part of it that he could leave behind – his representation of youth was also a representation of himself. Brodie states himself in his photobook that he was a victim of neglect and childhood abuse, which is what aligns him with these people who themselves feel outcasted. In the above photograph, Brodie presents an intimate scene of two young people sleeping together on a pile of cardboard, inside sleeping bags. The right-hand side of the composition behaves as the focal point, where the two people lie in the sleeping bags and a pile of clothes, whilst the left-hand side shows loose electrical wires, some sort of electrical appliance, a pair of shoes and various other junk, and a dirty floor peering from the cardboard. The people depicted bear resemblance to cosmetic features from the punk subculture, particularly through their short hairstyles and jewellery. The composition leaves a large central portion of the image as negative space where the cardboard sits, bringing attention to the outer thirds of the image, which then brings a viewer’s eyes toward the right-hand side where the people lie through the more diverse colour palette as opposed to the left side. Overall, the image holds a moving sense of humanity as it displays a tender moment between two people that society often look over and ignore, whether it’s a beggar on the street or a younger person acting out as a result of poor living conditions, which is something that I feel could be the cause for the level of attention that was brought to Brodie’s photobook when it was first published.
Whilst the two photographers represent these ignored youths similarly, their methods of doing so differ. Goldberg takes more of a perspective of an ‘outsider’, despite being involved with some of his subjects’ lives – it’s a world he hasn’t personally been part of, although he’s witnessed and become intertwined with it, ‘Raised by Wolves’ doesn’t capture the essence of being a runaway in the same way, being an ‘insider’ that Brodie does through his close behavioural relation to the people he photographs. From my own experience, I find myself more associated with the attitude of transience presented in ‘A Period of Juvenile Prosperity’, simply because its more representative of how I saw the world at the time and how my situation was; it felt more as though I was looking for something somewhere. Goldberg’s use of an established narrative works to create deep connections between his audience and his subjects using different forms of media, whereas Brodie’s approach of an open-ended catalogue of memories leaves it to a viewer to develop both their own story and connection to each image, whilst truly showing the humanity behind most of his subjects.
In conclusion, both photographers establish a sense of empathy between the audience and the troubled youths that they photograph, and both attempt to reveal the humanity behind the people that are often shunned and outcasted for their poor circumstances and inability to properly respond in ways that others can easily interpret and understand.
Bibliography
Goldberg, J. (2016), Raised by Wolves. Zurich: Scalo
Brodie, M. (2013), A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers
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 the 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.
Potential Essay Questions:
How do photographers such as Jim Goldberg, Mike Brodie, and Theo Gosselin represent young people in their work?
How do photographers such as Jim Goldberg, Mike Brodie, and Theo Gosselin represent different communities in their work?
Can photography be used to truly capture an experience?
Intertextual Referencing:
…the point that Brodie makes when he states ‘I was born in Mesa, Arizona.’ (Brodie 2012)…
Structure:
Essay question:
Opening quote
Introduction (250-500 words): What is your area study? Which artists will you be analysing and why? How will you be responding to their work and essay question?
Pg 1 (500 words): Historical/ theoretical context within art, photography and visual culture relevant to your area of study. Make links to art movements/ isms and some of the methods employed by critics and historian.
Pg 2 (500 words): Analyse first artist/photographer (Jim Goldberg) in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Pg 3 (500 words): Analyse second artist/photographer (Mike Brodie) in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.
Conclusion (250-500 words): Draw parallels, explore differences/ similarities between artists/photographers and that of your own work that you have produced
Bibliography: List all relevant sources used
Bibliography:
Brodie, M. (2012), A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers
Goldberg, J. (2016), Raised by Wolves: Bootleg.
Academic Sources
Research and identify 3-5 literary sources from a variety of media such as books, journal/magazines, internet, Youtube/video that relates to your personal study and artists references .
Begin to read essay, texts and interviews with your chosen artists as well as commentary from critics, historians and others.
It’s important that you show evidence of reading and draw upon different points of view – not only your own.
Take notes when you’re reading…key words, concepts, passages
Write down page number, author, year, title, publisher, place of publication so you can list source in a bibliography
Bibliography
List all the sources that you have identified above as literary sources. Where there are two or more works by one author in the same year distinguish them as 1988a, 1988b etc. Arrange literature in alphabetical order by author, or where no author is named, by the name of the museum or other organisation which produced the text. Apart from listing literature you must also list all other sources in alphabetical order e.g. websites/online sources, Youtube/ DVD/TV.
Quotation and Referencing:
Why should you reference?
To add academic support for your work
To support or disprove your argument
To show evidence of reading
To help readers locate your sources
To show respect for other people’s work
To avoid plagiarism
To achieve higher marks
What should you reference?
Anything that is based on a piece of information or idea that is not entirely your own.
That includes, direct quotes, paraphrasing or summarising of an idea, theory or concept, definitions, images, tables, graphs, maps or anything else obtained from a source
Open a new Word document > SAVE AS: Essay draft
Copy essay question into Essay title: Hypothesis > if you don’t have one yet, make one!
Copy your Statement of Intent from previous blogpost.
Identify 2 quotes from your literary sources using Harvard System of Referencing.
Use one quote as an opening quote:Choose a quote from either one of your photographers or critics. It has to be something that relates to your investigation.
Begin to write a paragraph (250-500 words) answering the following questions below.
You got 45 mins to write and upload to the blog!
Think about an opening that will draw your reader in e.g. you can use an opening quote that sets the scene. Or think more philosophically about the nature of photography and and feeble relationship with reality.
You should include in your introduction an outline of your intention of your study, e.g.
What are you going to investigate?
How does this area/ work interest you?
What are you trying to prove/challenge, argument/ counter-argument?
Whose work (artists/photographers) are you analysing and why?
What historical or theoretical context is the work situated within?
What links are there with your previous studies?
What have you explored or experimented with so far in your photography project?
How will your work develop.
What camera skills, techniques or digital processes have you used, or going to experiment with?
Mike Brodie, an American photographer also known by the moniker of “Polaroid Kidd, is notable for his imagery following his own experiences of trainhopping across North America in a period of five years, dating from 2004 to 2009. Inspired by punk ideologies and the photographs of National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry, Brodie set out to create images of those around him and they experiences they shared together, presenting them in a way that feels raw and intimate; something that comes as a side effect from a lack of formal education in photographic composition and technique.
– Mike Brodie
Brodie’s photographs encapsulate a powerful sense of youth and freedom that represents his outlook on both life and the others around him at the time of shooting. Take this image, for example; a young man holding onto the railing on the back of a fast-moving train giving the middle finger to the camera, with a confident expression on his face. Compositionally, the man is the focal point of the photograph, filling up a small section of the bottom half in the image, directly in the centre. Aside from him, the only other section of the piece in focus is the railing he dangles from, whereas the rest of the image is blurred from the fast motion of the train. Despite this, the track can be made out behind him and acts as leading lines to bring the viewer’s eyes away from the man and toward the rest of the composition. The expressions and gestures provided by the man represent the rebellious behaviours of youth culture, and their mutual desire to be free of the constraints of societal expectations through one way or another, living off the grid and on their own terms. Additionally, the colour palette of the photograph primarily utilises yellow and grey tones, the mans pink details on his shirt being the only differentiation.
In my own work, I want to represent the rawness of wanting to stray from the norms enforced by modern society, and the idea of forging my own path as opposed to a more typical career and lifestyle. I feel similar values appear in both my own and Brodie’s photographs, and I’d like mine to capture these emotions even better through the influence of his style.
take images of my bedrooms (parents house, grandma’s house, etc.)
work spaces (desks, tables)
Photoshoot 2: Streets
empty streets late at night or early morning (golden hour)
staged shot of someone’s silhouette at an ATM
staged shot of someone walking with a large backpack
shots of streetlamps illuminating road
Photoshoot 3: Abandoned / Empty Locations
exterior shots of abandoned/run-down buildings
(maybe) inside of abandoned buildings
car parks late at night
I want to combine these photoshoots with past images that I took during my experiences, and to write my own notes and explanations around each image, much like in the style of Jim Goldberg.
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.
– Jim Goldberg – Untitled (1977)
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.
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.
– Theo Gosselin
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.
– Theo Gosselin– Jim Goldberg
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.
As a whole, I would say that I’ve learned a lot about photography on this course so far, improving on my technical skills such as editing images and creating compositions, and my more practical skills, for example, using camera settings to my advantage and using lighting to establish tone and mood.
A lot of themes have been covered on this course, but the two that stick out to me the most as powerful and inspiring would have to be identity and nostalgia, as I feel they both link together, but they also provide plenty of personal experiences that make me who I am that I can reflect on and use in my work.
I’ve found myself more interested in the medium of film as a means of expressing my work, but I still prefer the idea of photography and feel that my skills in this area are more advanced and varied.
– Alex Hurst
Conceptual and documentary photography are the two approaches I’ve found to be the most intriguing as I believe there’s a lot more that I can do and explore with them, as opposed to tableaux photography, a genre that doesn’t really appeal to me all too much.
My favourite artists that I’ve looked at/studied are Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alec Soth, and Ansel Adams.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
I feel that Cartier-Bresson’s style had an incredibly large impact on my work, as it has completely changed my approach to street photography and improved how I put together a composition in the frame. His influence has also provided me with a lot of confidence toward shooting at ‘the decisive moment’ to capture an interesting and lively piece. This example above
Alec Soth
Alec Soth has inspired my work in the sense that I try to create compositions that focus on the person as a whole, so that their personality and aspirations are evident within my presentation of them, through their body language and even the use of props. His work has definitely made me more thoughtful about the message and implications of my own work.
– Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams was a very powerful artist to study when it came to landscape photography. It taught me different methods of adding drama and romanticism to my photographs, which gave them a stronger overall composition to make them stand out better.
