Blimey! Inspirashun. Nuff said, yeah?

After my test shoot with Tom on the 6th October, I walked away from the shoot feeling that my images were far too simple for this project, and so I began to think of different ideas

After stepping away from the monochrome darkroom after a year or so, I have been really eager to get back into the environment so I decided to look at experimental darkroom images by doing a quick Google Image search and looking at various things on my Pintrest. Below are some of the examples I have found.

The images I have found have inspired me greatly. Not only do they focus on the nude aspects of photography but by undergoing different experimentations to distort the image. By distorting the images in various ways like the images have undergone above, it helps to create more of a sense of fragmentation and also adds an element of “Fine Art” to the photography – the process taken to create these photographs have been carefully perfected on and look artistic or something you would have featured in a gallery.

Using this as inspiration, I want to focus my photography on using film, preferably 120mm still as I am still able to pick up the detail in my photoshoots and if I was to do anything to the film negatives I have plenty of space to experiment with. Once photoshoots have taken place I then want to undergo surface manipulation, playing with different materials, water and maybe even other chemicals to see what outcomes works best and to try and figure out how to make my imagery look more in the topic of The Fragmented Body. 

Idea Map: My Life

I decided to create a mind-map purely focusing on the theme of my life.
By doing this, I hope it will help me to gain some sort of structure on how I will be able to shape my project in both my digital format and my final product.

 

 

When creating this mind-map, I discovered that in my family archive, I know I have a mixture of both formal photographs (eg: School Portraits and Holiday Snapshots). In my tutorial with Ellen Nolan, we discussed about having the same, if not similar format of photographs throughout the project. I think once I have dug into the boxes full of photographs I will have to experiment with how I can incorporate the formal portraits with my holiday snapshots.

Idea Map

After creating my Inspirations List, I then went on to creating this mind map of ideas that I have come up with.

My first idea I was keen on was The Body came from my previous unit Vision and Knowledge. For V&K I looked into my family member’s death of cancer and in our introduction to Narrative we saw a collection of images by Nobuyoshi Araki and he documented his honeymoon with his wife (A Sentimental Journey) and he also documented the death of his wife ( A Winter Journey ). In A Winter Journey, Araki destroyed part of the negative before making a print. I thought it would be a good idea to try and stick to the theme of death and the body but taking images of the body and going through a similar process as what he did.

My second idea I was just as keen on was using Myself as part of this project. With the help of my Digital Tutor, he was explaining about how if we look through old photographs of ourselves posted on social networking sites such as Facebook, we begin to realise how much we changed and how it jogs our memory. Having the typical “lightbulb moment” I thought about said photographs of me that are online and my time when I was in the Air Training Corps (ATC). Being an Air Cadet was a fantastic part of my life, I did so much and gained so much knowledge, and one of the highlights was training and taking part in the RAF WARMA Marches. With this, I could create a digital journey showing my audience what torture I went through when doing my training through photographs into a slideshow movie, and have my voice over the top narrating the events. I also have a Military Marching song book sitting on my shelf at home, so another idea was to get a group of men singing a marching song to play over the top, and as a final product, create a book similar to the one I have at home but incorporating images in with the text.