CCTV

Due to my initial research for identity when taking photos of the objects around Manchester I decided not only to observe objects but also to survey people around me. I did this by using my own camera and a disposable to have varying qualities of photographs. I took these photos of random street scenes with a variety of different people appearing in each image and I did the same with the disposables. 

The disposable images were less detailed and therefore looked very similar to a CCTV image as they had a grainy quality. Also the colours appeared to be slightly muted drawing parallels with the black and white CCTV images. The most effective of these images were the ones that I took inside a shopping centre, having a birds eye view of the escalators because it seemed like it could be an actual CCTV camera observing a shop. The linear structure of the escalators broke up the image nicely, what I found surprising about these images was that the colouring came through in pink and blue. 

Objects forming an Identity

Developing on from my mark making I wanted to explore objects that could form an identity, the idea that people buy possessions due to what other people want to see them as or what they aspire to be. Candy Jernigan explores objects creating identity or leaving evidence of an identity as she collected objects throughout her life and stored them in a journal catalogued as her existence. 

Candy Jernigan Evidence 

I wanted to further this idea by asking people what objects they feel could represent them. Another quality that I like about Jernigan is how she presents her work in a publication format; on every page she considers the layout of each item and how it sits. This is something I am very interested in as last year I found myself presenting my work in a publication format. I started by using less tangible objects to create an identity. An image that stood out to me was a pavement with a cigarette underneath a bottle cap, this image looked to me like two columns in a layout format. 

This image immediately made me think of a businessman on his cigarette break, I saw the two slabs as a suit jacket with the cigarette and cap reflecting a tie, also the parallel that many men who work in business have stressful lives and can often be found having a cigarette on the pavement outside their work. I did this with other photographs I have taken such as 'The Construction Worker' that consists of three footprints engraved into the pavement. This took my mind to construction workers because they have left their mark on the urban landscape in buildings, roads and pavements and so these footprints become their initials/signature.

I move this on to looking at people I knew and giving them objects that could mirror their identity. My most effective images were 'coffee face' and 'camera face', both of which were developed in Photoshop and both were created by layering the object over the top of the face and manipulating the transparency.

This gave the effect that you see certain aspects of the object and certain features of the face making them appear as one. I also wanted to support this with a brief amount of text similar to how Sophie Calle does in her 'appointments' book. She has an object and then a small narrative to support it and to describe a certain person that has impacted her life. These images worked well individually however I wanted to bring all these different elements into a publication to illustrate my progression in the theme of identity, and also to trigger my brain into thinking about the layout of said publication. For research I went to Magma and looked at a variety of publications to see how they have laid out their images and text for me to find my own unique identity on the page.

Paper experimentation

As I see my practice mainly based in paper I decided it would be beneficial to experiment with this material, I collected all different types from recycled, thick, thin, different coloured, different textures, and decided to print on them with a detailed image that could show what qualities the paper had as shown below. 

I stuck to neutral tones and found that I liked the texture of the 'velum' paper which is second to the left as it has watercolour paper qualities, not to mention the tactile qualities of the paper. Colour-wise the recycled paper was just off white, I found this worked well and still kept the detail of the image. The printer paper at the University definitely gives the image more definition and picks up on all the details and gives the image a glossy finish, which I believe works well.  Investigating the Paper gallery made me think of my audience and who Paper Gallery are drawing and designing for. So far my work as been quite abstract and has been for more of a fine art  context, however I don't see myself as a fine art practitioner.

I see this part being the development stage of my work that will then inform where my practice goes. The only thing I can determine so far is that my work is for more of a marginal audience then a mainstream, due to the complex ideas and reasoning behind how my work is created. It is very conceptual like the work of Gosia Wlodarczak who looks closely at existence through drawing. 

untitled Gosia Wlodarczak

Facing up to ones Identity

With identity still as my main theme I wanted to bring in the face as it is an important element to suggest a person, and it is what most obviously identifies us socially. I took my most effective work ‘Salt Ticket Headphone’ and lay a portrait image on top to give the piece a physical identity. 

I experimented in Photoshop with revealing only elements of the face within the marks to see certain features such as the eyes or mouth. Including these elements within the charcoal marks was effective as it gave a suggestion of the physical person but doesn't make it immediately obvious. This made me think of layout and how moving certain elements on the page can really transform an image and its meaning. I also looked at using my previous hand written notes on observing people as a way of masking the physical being, contrasting the use of less frequent larger writing to more frequent smaller writing and the success to which they masked the identity of the human. The words I chose intentionally describe the human behind the text.