26) Small Details photoshoot - 7/4/18

After focusing on some interviews and portraits I decided to do another photoshoot focusing on the smaller details within Greenbank, in order to compliment and contrast against the portraits. My contact sheet from the shoot can be seen below.

I wanted to document how the domestic space of these individuals is evident within the van dwellers homes as well as spreading out to outside of the vehicles and in the surrounding area. This can be seen from their possessions outside used for simple tasks such as brushing your teeth, airing your washing, doing your washing up, keeping your milk cold etc.

I've picked out some of my favourite images (inserted below), and gone into more detail about why I think they're the strongest images.

These two above images are some of my favourites because it highlights the reality of all the elements you need for a home, for instance having somewhere to wash up. Due to the small nature of where these people live, their living spaces are expanded to outside the van, hence there being a washing up station outside. I could see these two images being used together as a diptic, because they show different elements of the same space.

Within this shoot I started to realise that I was shooting with mainly a portrait style instead of landscape, and I think this works really well with the above 3 still life shots. They're simple but tell the story of how these people live and the tools that allow them to do this, for instance the gas for their stoves, bottled / collected water for various uses and putting their milk outside to keep it cool. I think these will work really well contrasted with portraits within my final output, hopefully telling a story that will resonate with the viewers. I feel this work harks back to when I looked at Sophie Green's project 'GYPSY GOLD' and I felt inspired by her closed in detail shots of horses and travellers.

These last two images also show the overflow of domestic life of these individuals, and even through just depicting a duvet drying on a fence, or a sign for free clothes, it tells you a lot about how these individuals are just trying to live their lives in the easiest way possible, and also how generous they are as a community.

Overall I'm really pleased with these detail shots and I can't wait to start printing out images and laying them next to each other to see how they fit together and can be sequenced. This is something we're going to do in our next tutorial, which I feel will allow me to see if I need to do anymore shooting and see where the project is lacking.

#creativeinteractions #photoshoot