Category: Uncategorised

• Brandon Wilkins is a British Freelance photographer and video producer from Essex.
• Many of his photos are gritty, candid shots, portraying young, free and unconfined people smoking and skating.
• The dirty dishes in some of his images show the reality of leaving home for the first time and living with your friends.

 

References:

Magazine, H. (2020). Smoking, skating and dirty dishes: The Essex photographer capturing life with the boys. [online] HERO magazine <hero-magazine.com/article/78666/smoking-skating-and-dirty-dishes-the-essex-photographer-capturing-life-with-the-boys> [Accessed 5 Dec. 2019].

 

Richard Billingham is an English photographer, artist filmmaker from Birmingham. He is best known for his photography book called Ray’s a Laugh (1996), which documents the life of his alcoholic father, Ray and his obese and heavily tattooed mother, Liz. He also published a few short films about his parents, including Ray & Liz (2018), which is a memoir of his childhood, depicting the poverty and deprivation he grew up in. In these projects his parents are portrayed as grotesque figures.

In 1996, Billingham had a photography exhibition at the National museum of Photography, Film and television in Bradford, UK and in 1997 his work made it in the exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Art which showcased the art collection of Charles Saatchi.

 

References:

Adams, T. (2020). Mr and Mrs Billingham and Frosty Jack’s | Tim Adams. [online] the Guardian <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/mar/13/richard-billingham-tower-block-white-dee-rays-a-laugh-liz>[Accessed 5 Dec. 2019].

 

Gallery, S. (2020). Richard Billingham – Artist’s Profile – The Saatchi Gallery. [online] Saatchigallery.com <https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/richard_billingham.htm>  [Accessed 5 Dec. 2019].

Mark Power is a British photographer who is a member of Magnum Photos and Professor of Photography in the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton. Power has worked with the editorial and charity markets for almost a decade, before he began teaching in the early 1990s. Much of his work has been in famous galleries across the world such as The Arts Council of England, the British Council, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum and Marrakech Museum of Photography and Visual Art.

In addition, Mark Power has also published eight books. For example: The Shipping Forecast (1996), Superstructure (2000), The Treasury Project (2002), 26 Different Endings (2007), The Sound of Two Songs (2010), Mass (2013), Die Mauer ist Weg! (2014) and Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment (2016).

 

References:

Magnum Photos. (2020). Mark Power, Photographer Profile,  Magnum Photos. [online] <https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/mark-power> [Accessed 5 Dec. 2019].

Markpower.co.uk. (2019). Biography. [online]  <https://www.markpower.co.uk/Biography> [Accessed 5 Dec. 2019].

Today I went to Churchill Square and saw the Extinction Rebellion Climate Change strike who were boycotting Black Friday. I took this as a good opportunity to take out my camera and photograph the event because it was all about young people fighting for their future.

When I took these photos I had to consider the lighting outside as it was a sunny day, therefore I used camera settings such as an aperture of f11 for a medium depth of field as well as an ISO of 200 because it was a bright day so the lens was more exposed to light.  Overall, I am pleased with these photos, especially the black and white ones because it adds more drama and meaning to the photos however, composing the images was difficult because there was so many people and so much happening at once.

 

I took some pictures following my housemates around (with their permission). I also took photos of the slight messes in the house to depict the reality of moving out of home and living with friends for the first time. I am pleased with these photos because I like the lighting and composition of them.

Looked at the photos again and decided to go from there and work on the portraits a bit more, changed my idea a bit and gave it the theme of “youth culture” and millennials and the problems we face nowadays such as politics, climate change and student life.

Today I walked around Brighton town centre to take photos of my friends Bradley and Kyle. I mainly took photos on the beach by the Old Pier.

I started off by taking portraits, however, I wasn’t feeling very inspired and I didn’t have a particular theme in mind, making it difficult  for me to tell them want to do. I wanted these images to portray them having fun and acting natural but I wasn’t sure how to communicate that with my models and how to get them to pose naturally. Another thing I found difficult was the lighting because although it was a nice day and it was towards sunset, the light was still too bright but by the time we had everything figured it out, it was cold and the sun was going down quickly.

After this, I went home and rethought my idea because I wasn’t sure that the portraits were working for me.

 

Having been a student at university of a year and a half now and having moved away from home and currently living with my friends, depicting the reality of what it’s actually like because although this big change in our lives is huge and it’s a big stepping stone into adulthood, it’s also a very scary change and my images aim to portray what this change living away from home and being independent for the first time is really like by focusing on student life and Millennial culture depicting the struggles and realities of living away from home and with your friends for the first time and actually becoming an independent young adult.

“In the 1920s, when Monholy-Nagy commented on the future importance of camera literacy, he could hardly have anticipated the extent to which photographic imagery would come to permeate contemporary communications” (Wells,2015:13). This suggests that in recent years, audio-visual technology such as photography and film are having such a big impact on our world today as it is constantly changing how we interpret the world.

References:

Wells, L. 2015, Photography: a critical introduction, Routledge, Abington

 

Absence is presence without Distance.

For this project I will be photographing my mum in her sense of place which is her home in Argentina. I thought I would use my mum as part of my project because for me, I can’t think of my sense of place seeing as I grew up travelling all over the world and every 4 years my family would move again, therefore I don’t have one place I consider my home, apart from where I come from which is Tunbridge Wells, Kent. However, my family now live abroad in South America.

To me, people such as my friends and family are my home and where I feel the safest but it is difficult for me to take pictures of them because we don’t see each other so often anymore as they live on the other side of the world. Furthermore, I decided to use my mum as my main subject because I saw her again this Christmas and travelled to to Argentina to spend time with her family. I believe this was a good idea because it was the first time in about 2 years that she was reunited with everyone and I intend to capture all the emotions from when we arrive to when we leave. In this project I aimed to photograph people’s way of life and traditions as they are very different to ours here i England. In Argentina they are currently suffering from a political and financial crisis where their currency (the peso) is half of its value and the people are suffering financially with inflation and they are constantly protesting against the bad government. Overall, my plan was to see if this crisis had an affect on people’s ways of lives.

Overall, I enjoyed this project because I escaped my comfort zone and documented my mum in her sense of place and photographed the joy on people’s faces at a family reunion. I also loved photographing the culture and traditions that surrounded us.

This week we worked in groups to create a set of images that match the title “Art School”.

For this we photographed details o f the Grand Parade building that matched the title from the brief.