- Stereotypes (gender, race, age, religion, class)
- Authority (government, people in power, protests)
- Photography (compositions, lighting, camera settings)
- Myself (experiences, behaviours, ideas)
To challenge something is to rebel against it, something that is often done by a lot of photographers and artists. When I think of the word ‘rebel,’ I often think about activism against some form of authority, whether small or large. Artists often express rebellion through subliminal messages in their work, or bold messages such as through graffiti. The style of graffiti in itself represents youth culture, something I align with, and something that I could consider searching for and finding images of. In my own work, I see myself challenging other people’s opinions and views on certain groups of people, particularly youth, but also my own views, as they change and adapt through my own experiences. I’m keen on the idea of going against what others think, as I often trust my judgement the most – for better or worse – which could actually be an idea in itself for this project, going against who I am and what I do, although this may become too complicated. Alternatively, I’m also interested in directly challenging various stereotypes, instead of the natural subtlety that usually ends up in my work. Whatever I decide to challenge, I want to do it through juxtaposition, presenting both the ‘order and disorder’ of what I decide to shoot.
Nicholas Goodden is a photographer that has a unique way of presenting graffiti in his photographs, desaturating his images, but leaving the colours within the artwork he shoots as it bends with the landscape around it. It could be argued that as Goodden only takes images of the work, and doesn’t explicitly do it himself, he’s merely observing the work through the camera lens, although I feel that by photographing this, he almost provides a platform for the message of the artwork to spread further, which could be considered to aid and further challenge this. Personally, I find his use of limiting the saturation in his images to a specified area to create a focal point interesting, and feel that it shows a more unique, interesting part of the world that’s often looked over as more destructive, which I could recreate in my own work.
I could also challenge compositional standards of photography, through both the use of angles and technical aspects, which could leave for some interesting and unique final images. A key way that I would want to execute this would be through the use of angles and framing. I could take portrait images of people to where they’re just unnaturally off-centred in the image, even off to the edge completely, and play around with angles, such as extreme worm/bird’s eye. Regardless, this gives me the chance to experiment with different settings and what can work compositionally, without necessarily conforming to typical photography standards.
