Evaluation

Over the past 4 months my project has evolved substantially leaving me with an end result that I am happy with and excited to show in an exhibition. At the beginning of documentary perspectives, I planned on basing my project around the village that I grew up in and the local business that support and hold the community together. However, due to COVID-19 this idea wasn’t an option anymore as I couldn’t go home due to my father’s health and local business would be closed. With little ideas left I chose to document my house mates and our daily lives within lockdown. Over lockdown I have been isolating with my boyfriend and my three other house mates, this allowed me to obtain a wide range of different images from everyone’s different perspective and experience’s. 

Photographing my house mates has been a subject idea that I have wanted to start pre- lockdown, as I found that it has potential to be a really interesting and fun project to shoot as everyone has their own individual quirks; along with the fact that student living is so different to your average home life. With this in mind I wanted to capture everything that I could even if it was my friends lounging around on their beds as I wanted to capture the boredom, stress and laughter that we went through during this national lockdown. I planned to shoot as much as I could, this paid off as I managed to obtain a substantial number of images. I started off this project with the thought process of documenting the lock down as a whole with images of the residence of St Pauls and people going about their daily life. However, with some consideration I chose to stick to documenting my house as it seemed very broad to document everything around me. By condensing my work to my house, it allowed me to get more personal with what lock down was like in our experience. 

For my final photos I picked 10 images that I believed to have best represented what lockdown has been like isolating with friends. I started off the process by picking 4 portraits of each of my friends as I wanted to include something individual for each of them, documenting how they have felt their personal experience of lock down has been like. Along with the individual images, I also shot a lot of group photos as the majority of the time we were together. Another aspect of post – production that I took into account was the colouring of my images and how I planned to showcase them. I originally loved the idea of shooting in 35mm colour film as I love the aesthetic and rustic appearance however, with the lockdown I wouldn’t be able to develop my images. From this I also took into consideration shooting digitally while editing my images to by monochromatic. This was something that I tested out on my images but was only successful with a few; many of my images didn’t have enough texture or contrast for this to work well. 

The rationale behind the layout of my final images was that I wanted to show a short timeline of what isolation has been like over these past months. This is why I chose to start with a portrait of Jamie watching Boris Johnsons lock down speech and end with Maddie staring out the window. With these images at the start and finish I picked carefully where the other images would sit according to where in the timeline they were taken. For aesthetic reasons I also chose to place a portrait image after every two landscape frames, this was in order for it to sit nicely on the wall. 

Overall, I am happy with the final turn out of my images under these difficult circumstances and the unifying narrative that the photos portray.