Developing idea - Portraits Series

I took inspiration from the Suite Vénitienne series by Sophie Calle. I found the act of stalking her subject to be a great invasion of privacy. Thinking about this, I had the idea of creating an anonymous portrait by removing their identity. I thought about the different ways I could take away someones personality. 

I quickly made some notes about how I could possibly take away someone's identity.

The idea of using masks wouldn't really take away someones identity but simply replace it with the personality of the mask and decided against this concept. Strategically stalking somebody sounded too invasive and trying to get that perfectly timed shot sounded incredibly hit and miss, which would of been too time consuming. The two last ideas spoke out to me the most and decided to create an image for each. 

                                     
 Evaluation of ideas:

Looking at the two outcomes, the pixelation doesn't take enough of the persons identity away as you can still make out some smaller details and colour too also adds more personality into the image. Considering this, I would like to continue with experimenting with the Silhouettes because the idea is stronger and has a greater impact.

Conclusion:

The first four images are the strongest in composition, the last two images aren't as strong because of this and I would have liked to have created more images in place of them if there were more time. In the image of the woman walking up the stairs I feel that she is lost within the darkness of the image. 

The parameter of having only a week to come up with a shoot and edit an idea was challenging and as the deadline drew closer and closer and not having the right weather to take my images was becoming difficult. I only had Sunday to take my images and it turns out that the cold weather kept people inside which left me without any subjects to take images of. Whilst sat in the cold searching for a anything living to take a picture of, I thought back to the meaning behind my images. By showing a Silhouette of someone shows an absence of a person, I didn't need a subject. I shot my images and went back to my computer. I used images online of silhouetted people and placed them within my images. Overall, the idea is something which I haven't looked into before and could be something to continue exploring for my portraits series. The first four images are the strongest in composition, the last two images aren't as strong because of this and I would have liked to have created more images in place of them if there were more time. 

From this activity, I have thought about the many ways to take away someone's identity using post-production techniques which is available. I would like to step away from these ideas as I feel as though they are not as strong contextually. I would like to keep this idea of "documenting" and taking candid shots. Exploring into this idea of removing someones identity and the idea of taking someone out of the landscape, I thought about how the homeless are another form of identity loss as they once were -blank- and had a "normal" life. I would like to investigate this further as a way of showing someone having their identity taken.