Project Proposal - Portraits Series

Project Proposal

Research - I started looking into Sophie Calle's work which she stalked a mans move to a new city and followed behind him and created a series of images which shows us a somewhat unidentifiable man minding his own business. 

From this I used one of the weekly tasks to explore this idea of identity and taking away someones identity. I explored a couple of ideas but they were too focused on post-production and I wanted to explore something with more meaning behind it. I went back over the brief and took inspiration from it suggesting to look into something close to home. 

This brought me back to a news article I recently read about my hometown of Milton Keynes about the death of a homeless man. I thought hard about how your identity is what you do for a living and where you live and how you dress which makes you have an identity but I wanted to show the loss of identity and an example of that is homeless people. 

I went into researching homelessness in Milton Keynes and looked at how the media was using the "tent city" as a gimmick to sell papers which I found to be insensitive as they're making money off of someone else's misfortune. From this I had my idea in place as I want to show a series of three portraits of the people inhabiting these tents with the potential idea of showing their tents as well.

I researched into photographers who's work shows the homeless and found Lee Jeffries and found his images to be amazing. I would like to attempt to use some of his style within my own images. 

Idea - My idea is to reveal the people living in these tents as a way to demonstrate that they're misjudged by the media. I will do this by taking portraits of the people who live in the tents, I want to express closeness between the viewer and the model so I will keep my composition close and tightly framed as I possible can as this will show there aren't any boundaries which will allow the viewer to see that they're just people without an identity and not a threat. Through the use of technical skill and post production I would like to highlight the kindness in their faces through one of their facial feature, I am considering using a wide aperture to create a deep but gradual blur to draw focus to the feature I wish or by editing in post-production. I want to come out with 4-6 outcomes, three of which will be the portraits and I am considering having the tent image to be 3 separate images or one big one. I will experiment with a range of different layouts for the exhibition.