2020 is the year for documentary photography to begin for me. This feels like a good next step.
Why?
Street photography has taught me a lot: it’s sharpened composition skills; it’s taught me to see and react quickly to what’s happening around me. But it will never be my first love. As one of my favourite Instagrammers, @fluffystreetcloud recently said, I like to treat people on the street with the same level of respect that I would like to be paid when going about my daily life. I have never quite reconciled myself with the business of “stealing” candid shots, however much I intellectualise it.
Travel photography has long been “my thing”, borne of a desire to see the world and capture those wonderful moments you experience along the way. They are often beautiful, evocative images - but on a fleeting visit to a place, you can only scratch the surface. It’s a superficial view on a much more permanent world.
Documentary photography makes sense, then, as an opportunity to dig deeper and explore subjects and themes. And for someone who has always been heavily influenced by social history this is even more appealing.
So What Am I Doing About It?
Getting into documentary feels quite hard. What subjects should I cover? What makes a good story? How do I make contact with the right people? How do I sequence the images to make them compelling? What do I actually want the finished product to be and who do I want to see it?
To teach me and to kick-start me into action I’ve done a couple of things.
1) Joined Photo Fusion in Brixton. Recommended by a friend, Photo Fusion do a monthly Saturday photo club where members present some of the projects they’ve been working on and others give feedback. As well as this they run a lot of other photo-related services such as processing, courses on alternative film processes such as salt printing and have a lovely members’ gallery. For £60 a year membership, this is one of the best bargains around.
2) Signed up to a documentary photography course at City Lit. So far this is really interesting, and we need to create a project that we will develop over the course of the coming weeks.
Ideas
There are so many ideas and not enough time. I really like the idea of exploring identity, and how it is shaped. I like the idea of circus and performance (though access may be tricky). In this day and age of immigration rhetoric I like the idea of exploring that we are all migrants in some way, shape or form.
But the idea I want to develop is around the elderly. How they live here in the UK, the services that are available and the isolation that our First World lives bring. Shooting overseas when I travel is also a great way of adding to this work, and documenting how the elderly live elsewhere - the work shot in Romania in November is a good pre-cursor to this.
Assignment
For this week’s documentary homework we have been asked to shoot in a location that we usually wouldn’t, and to produce a more symbolic image as part of this.
It felt like the right thing to do to shoot on film and, to add to the nostalgia (and avoid delays in film processing), it was time to whip out the newly acquired Polaroid. Bought on eBay, the camera was only slightly more expensive than the film itself. (But that film is magic - it’s even got its own battery charge in it!) I didn’t read the instructions on the packet before using the film however, and waved the exposures in the air as was the fashion in our childhoods instead of letting them develop in the dark, so the results - as you can see below - are somewhat patchy and blown.
In terms of symbolism, I think the answer has to lie in the elderly themselves but as I don’t have access to a compelling subject right now I decided to make a trip to the local cemetery. It was while photographing the grave of a Vietnamese immigrant, below, that it suddenly occurred it would be interesting to document how elderly immigrants cope with not just ageing but also ageing in a community with sometimes very different norms and values to the ones they grew up in. So, this is the direction that I am going to take.
And finally, for now, I’m quite happy with my over-exposed Polaroids. They’re nostalgic, they’re a thing of the past and they are misty - like stepping back in time through eyes with cataracts. It will be good to see where this one goes, and I am excited about longer term pieces of work with a running narrative.
