Contextual Document

For this project, at first I was struggling to figure out what I wanted to take my photo’s
of and the story I wanted to create, I started taking photo’s around the house and felt
that I wasn’t really feeling much connection to them. The first idea I wanted to
explore was Covid19 and the pandemic we are currently facing, it has been a testing
time for everyone and I felt that I could express what it had been doing to me and the
people around me. As the brief was about journaling I knew I needed to do some
research to have a look at what others had done, how they used text and images to
depict their story how it came across to me and how I then wanted my work to come
across to others. First I looked at Journalist Stacey Dooley, I had watched some of
her work before as she has had many documentary series that she’d been involved
in, she has dealt with stories that involve terrorists, and drug dealers and I felt that I
liked her way of telling the story. She has written some work about how she started
her career in journalism, below is part of the piece written by her.

“The flight home was the longest I’d ever been on, and I had mad jetlag on my first
night back at my mum’s house where I was living at the time. I just couldn’t sleep. I
felt I’d been on an emotional rollercoaster. I lay in the bed thinking, That was all just
so unbelievable!
I sat up. Here I am in my comfy bed, I thought, but what about the boy at the
orphanage and the girl with the bleeding hands? The thoughts were rushing through
my head: I want to do something to help them. I want to do my bit.

I racked my brains for ideas and then suddenly it came to me. My twentieth birthday
was coming up; I would ask the kids at the orphanage to draw some pictures and I
would auction them at my birthday party. We’ll go for a curry, I decided. I’ll give the
curry house a couple of hundred quid and they’ll put some food on. We’ll sell the
pictures and then we’ll give all the money back to the orphanage, back to the kids.”
[ CITATION Sta19 \l 1033 ]
I like her way of writing, I feel there is a great deal of emotion coming across and she
seems down to earth like many people could connect with her. There is excitement
and suspense too which makes you want to read on, I don’t feel bored by her. I
wanted the way I write about my pictures to come across as me, I don’t want it to feel
like it could have been anyone who had written it, I wanted my personality to come
across like I feel hers does.
After I had taken some photo’s around the house I noticed my metal kitchen rack and
it reminded me of prison bars and got me thinking about how I had been feeling like I
was in some sort of prison. We are in lockdown and unable to go out of the house
much, everyone felt scared to go out and we felt trapped. I started experimenting
taking pictures of myself and my son behind the kitchen rack and it did look in some
way like we were in a cell. Lizzie Sadin is one photographer who has done some
work in prisons.
[ CITATION Liz20 \l 1033 ]
I really like the idea of black and white images, I felt this would work for what I was
doing and set the mood I wanted to create.
After some exploring I decided I didn’t want to continue this prison project and I went
back to documenting and journaling my day to day life during the pandemic.

“Diane Arbus once said, ‘a photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells
you the less you know.’ Documentary photography has always come with a great
responsibility: capturing the true essence of reality. We uncover the best
documentary photographers who have shared a secret from the past, for you to
discover.”
[ CITATION Dia20 \l 1033 ]
I took photo’s everyday for around a month and each day I wrote a sentence or two
on what I had done and how I had been felling that day, I was almost at the end of
my month and a thought came to me about how I felt that all this doing this project I
felt I was giving myself pep talks and telling myself it’s going to be okay and look how
far you have come, not just this month but in the past few years. This got me thinking
about the past, I thought about when I was 17 and how my life changed from that
time onwards and didn’t stop since, I thought to myself, I wonder what I would have
said or done differently if had the knowledge and experience of life that I have now,
would I have made different decisions and not put up with certain things or let them
drag on for longer than they needed too. I decided I wanted to incorporate this into
my journal, I have this time at home so why not use this to take a sit down with my
past and look at where I have been and got to on my personal journey. I wanted to
continue on my blog buy write my post as if I was writing a diary on what happened
and my feelings that day, I would start with “Dear 17 year old me” an address them
to myself but my old self, I would talk to her as if we were in some ways two different
people because essentially the person I was at 17 is different to who I am today, still
the same person but a different version of me, I wanted to take myself through the
years and almost do some healing in a way.
Although this idea was something that seemed to enter my head, I felt that it had
come from other places over the past few months. I remember my uni tutor Emilie
talking to me about a project she had done when I was looking for ideas for studio
and thinking about a superhero project. She had done a project called “when I am
big” which was about adults modelling and dressing up as what they would have
wanted to be when they were little, I felt like this subconsciously influenced me
because it was something I thought about straight after my idea came into my head.
Emilie’s work reminded me of thinking about the past and what we wanted at the
time and then coming into the future and seeing what we became, and it got me
thinking about all that time in-between, the struggles or achievements we faced in
the last so many years and in my case 10 years.

[ CITATION Emi20 \l 1033 ]

Another place that I felt this had stemmed from was some quotes I had read, I’m
often looking up quotes for positive motivation and I had stumbled across these,
[ CITATION Ste \l 1033 ]
The people writing these are talking as if they are talking back to their younger self
and giving themselves the advice that maybe they felt they could have needed at
that time, how they could of done things a little different and maybe not been so hard
on themselves.
I feel like over the course of this module my work has progressed with sudden
changed that I didn’t expect, I started with one idea and have come out the end of
this with a totally different one. I feel like I have progressed creatively and my work
has been given more meaning to it by the end of this. I have a better understanding
of text, when I was first putting writing with my image it was very short and I
struggled to find something to write about and then as I progressed I was writing
much more on one photograph and putting more thought into what I wanted to say
and what I was trying to express. Technically my photography is improving, although
some of my images we’re just quick phone snapshots as I wanted to grasp the exact
moment of what was happening to tell my story as it was, but others I put more
thought into trying to get the correct exposures and thinking about my composition.
Overall I feel pleased with my final outcome, there have been a few twists and turns
in this module but I feel that I ended up in the right destination at the end and I’m
glad that I didn’t stick with my initial first ideas and I just let my thoughts and
research take me in other directions. I feel this project is one I could come back too
and visit again, I could come back to it in a few years time or another 10 and just
reflect on the years that have passed and where I am now. I feel that “Dear 17 year
old me” next time could be written in an actual diary, I think because my idea
changed so late in the module I didn’t end up with enough time to do this, so I would
think about that for future.