Exploring the term ‘street’, taking inspiration from fashion, pop culture before diving into my personal thoughts on the smaller aspects of life in an urban area..
Starting off college being sucked into street fashion, expensive brands and small accessories capable of sending me into debt, I felt that looking at this was the perfect way to start off a project I’d decided to look at street life in. Replicating popular poses from well established fashion pages on Instagram, taking images focusing on the full outfit as well as the accessories; this shoot recreated the general aesthetic of any 2018 fashion blog.
Continuing with my interest in pop-culture, I took inspiration from a music video and decided to have a go at creating a GIF to add something a bit more interesting into my photography skill and knowledge – something to show off with. Model in a mask, sticking to the questionable trend of hiding your face in any photo, wearing a hat to hide just that little bit more. While I look back and really question some of things we did, it shows our generation trying to hide from the public, whether that be from anxiety, hatred of anything outdoors, fear of whatever is going on; it’s the same as a 4 year old covering their eyes and because they can’t see you, you ‘can’t see them.’
Regardless, thanks to my interest in all of this, I’ve been keen on creating more and more animated photos whenever I can find an opportunity.
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There’s a chunk of this project I can’t put online because models didn’t want them posted anywhere, but there was a shoot surrounding shop owners and their shopfronts. I got a bit bored of portraiture, so moved on to actual street life instead of my preferred method of ‘comfort photography’ with friends, moving more into the public and trying to gain confidence at the same time as developing photographic skills.
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PERSONNEL
Broken mirrors reflecting broken personalities, look at that deep concept any college student could have thought of. But realistically, this is a big issue and it was important to highlight as a part of street life as I progressed away from being ‘edgy’ and wanted to address more personal issues as I came towards the end of this project. Removing the colour adds to the isolation this demographic can feel when figuring out who they are and where they belong while somehow trying to keep a thriving social life, alongside the crippling deadlines that everyone faces.
Glitch photography – also known as the point I lost trust in anything.
I got concerned about the entire idea of surveillance and monitoring, being constantly watched in any public area for any reason. So instead of doing the sensible thing and staying away from these evil eyes on the street, I went out and took a picture of every single camera I saw in Horsham.
Looking at the camera as well as whatever it was watching in the image using a glitch effect to combine the images just added to my terrifying thought that the world was corrupted and we may as well be under mind control. I spent hours on hours editing photos in Audacity (Windows default audio editor), trying to corrupt images without actually seeing what was happening to them – kind of similar to being watched without knowing who’s watching or why, a connection a made during the editing process. Surprisingly, it takes a long time to get a desired outcome when you can’t see what you’re doing, but making an image echo and reverb did the trick.
I could spend multiple paragraphs explaining my final piece, combing the glitch technique and GIF which I had explored earlier on in this project. But basically, it follows a mistrust in emergency services and the ways our thoughts and actions are influenced through the media. Taking newspaper headlines that show the pure mess of politics in Europe, emergency vehicles, CCTV cameras (these were included to show that the pure chaos is being monitored), and the familiar anonymous mask – essentially a large group of people who influenced my thought towards the mistrust of anything and everything. Red and blue colour overlays are spread throughout the animation, keeping a theme of the emergency services and urgency throughout the entire piece.
Zak Michaelwaite 