My fourth and final brief for Photography was to create a series of 6 images that represent the idea of Home. I struggled with this piece at first as the idea was much too broad meaning I often went off topic. Referring to Adam O’Meara and peers for guidance, I found out fellow classmate and friend, Harry Beaumont, was creating his set of work around the saying ‘Home is Where You Lay Your Hat’ which inspired me to find my own saying or cliché to work around. Eventually I stumbled across this image which really tipped the scale for what I wanted my idea to be:
The image humoured me but also got me thinking, no matter where you are or what situation you’re in, everyone is connected by the internet. I personally strongly keep in contact with my family via various Social Media platforms like Whatsapp or Facebook so the idea really struck me inspiring me to come up with a piece involving various people holding their laptops with a picture of their family on the screen. I specifically asked them to show a picture that held a lot of sentimental meaning to them to really get the feeling of Home and how you’ll always be connected as a family no matter where you are. These are my images:
The thought behind this particular set of images was to completely remove the colour from everything except the image on the screen as I felt I wanted to portray a sense of isolation in the subjects showing they are away from their families, yet remain a bright and colourful feel to the image on the screen when they remember their families back home thus the family image is bright and happy. I also asked the subjects to ‘stand as though their family was around them’ to attempt to get a comfortable and natural look to further embrace that sort of family portrait style of image and create a comforting feel to my images. This went two ways, either the subject would force a smile or in certain cases not smile at all which I found to be very interesting and say a lot about their family values and how comfortable they are expressing themselves.
A large inspiration for me came from an incredible set of images called ‘Being Together’ created by photographer John Clang. In this set of images, John would project images of his family from over Skype calls onto walls and stand in them to create the feeling as though he was there with them. I wanted to use this sense of participating in a family portrait without actually being there without completely replicating the idea thus using the image on a laptop rather than a projection on the wall.