Some people think I’m an old man, mainly my kids, I’m nearly 50 but have just begun a part time BA(Hons) Degree in Photography at the University Of Wolverhampton. The module I’m taking this year, the first of six years, is “Media And Methods” and the first semester will be spent learning colour photography and producing prints from the images with the ultimate goal of producing a sequence of images.
Brief Encounter
The brief for this project is “The Colour Of Change” so I put my tiny brain into gear and using some brainstorming techniques learnt from Six Sigma Project Methodologies and other training courses from my past, I put together a diagram (not a very technical diagram) of the ideas that sprung to mind.
Forever Autumn
The first idea out of the gates was Autumn as we’re now past the autumn equinox and the seasons definitely look like they’re changing. The colours of the leaves, trees and plants always turn a lovely golden brown and rich yellow on their way to losing all of their chlorophyll. I’ve a few photos taken on digital cameras of parks, golf courses and tree lined streets from previous years but none have ever wowed me. It’s probably my basic photography and editing that lets me down but I also feel that this will be or has been over used for colour projects so will avoid this unless it is a fall back option through having nothing else to use.
Other ideas considered and added to the long list are:
- Climate – Weather into winter
- Shooting Season Starts – Pub based rifle shooting league begins again in October.
- Card / Cash / Money – Changing use of cards and contactless rather than cash
- Derelict & Empty Shops – Numerous buildings being refurbed and empty shops
- Covid 19 Pandemic – Signs, social distance, masks, rules, just eat, Deliveroo, anti-vax graffiti and stickers
- Shopping – Changing face of shopping, Home Delivery, masks in shops, queueing
- Brexit – symbols of nationalism in Britain, stickers, graffiti of Remainers
- Retro Clothes – fashion changes and comes back around, mullets, shell suits
- Location Change – transport, walking, a step in a journey
- Kids To University – things that change when kids have gone to uni
- Me to University – things that have changed for me starting a uni course
- Street Portraits – asking people what’s changed for them since start of pandemic, set up in street.
- Social Care – people in towns who are “lost”, not homeless but people spending all day in town.
- EU Flags – colours of clothes, outfits, cars, shop windows , reflecting the EU colours
- Photography (Mobiles & CCTV) – How photos are taken for Instagram using phones, and surveillance gear
- Technology – electric scooters, electric cars
- Social Media – how does social media creep into everyday life, adverts, people selfieing
- Entertainment & Gigs – queuing for gigs, requirement for covid vax passport
- Politics – political symbols in the environment, polemic and divisive with strong opinions
- Aging Street Hardware – hand rails with the paint worn away, doors with marks where pushed, windows broken
- Economy – signs of an economic issue, homeless, begging, charities, foodbanks
Digital Tryout
Before our 2nd Workshop and borrowing a colour camera from the university, I went out with my Digital SLR camera to work on some of the ideas and also look back through the last two or three months of predominantly street photography images. Most of the older photos I’d changed to Black and White (B&W) to take some distracting colour out of the focus or eyeline of the viewer.
The images I took on the street in colour didn’t immediately fit into the category of change but there were a few that fit into one of the brainstorm categories and some that fit into multiple categories. I chose to print small versions of them out in contact sheet format from Lightroom and then add them to my sketch book so I could look at them together.
Replacements
One of the last ideas I had was “Replacements” that is “Things that have been changed for something new, in a group of the remaining old things.”
The idea occurred to me as I was working at home, went downstairs to make a much needed cup of coffee and I stepped out onto my garden patio for a brief breath of fresh air whilst waiting for the kettle to boil, everyone knows they boil more slowly when you watch them..
Looking around the garden I changed my view straight downwards to my feet for some reason and noticed that the slab my foot was on was a completely different colour to the rest. It looked newer and cleaner whilst the surrounding slabs were aged, faded and covered in black mould. It stood out as being the odd one out of the group of slabs. I know the reason it was changed, and I also swapped it in to the patio to replace a broken slab so I shouldn’t be too surprised by the fact it’s different.
It was then that I thought “I bet there’s loads of items in life and our surroundings where something needed changing, but the rest were left showing their age” I immediately took out my Canon G7XII to take some pictures of the slabs so I wouldn’t forget this idea.
This idea chimed with me and after looking around at other photographers projects online I couldn’t see the theme “Replacement” mentioned anywhere as a project and I wondered how many other instances of changed/replaced items I’d find. Time to start a search for things that have been altered for some reason and stand out as replaced.
Obviously a photo of a slab like the one above isn’t pretty in a classic sense of the word and doesn’t immediately fit into the usual composition guidelines used by many artists and photographers but ther was something honest, raw, and uncomplicated about it.
Altering the angle the photo was taken at to include some detail, such as the supermarket in the background of the red block paving bricks helped to give a context that helps to understand where this was. Altering the angle of the slab photo or moving the junction of four corners to a point in line with the “rule of thirds” seemed to help with a more aesthetic image. If indeed you can call an image of the floor aesthetic.
Now obviously I wouldn’t stick to solely floor sections that have been replaced, it might get tiresome quickly and lack interest so I got to thinking about other items that have been replaced.
First 35mm Colour Shot
A trip to the Tesco filling station on Thursday this week, with the newly acquired and loaded Nikon FM2 SLR film camera and my digital camera in the boot, just in case I came across something interesting. Before I’d got to the end of the Lancaster Road I remembered that there was recently some freshly daubed graffiti on a shop front, previously Brantano shoes, that was something I wished to capture.
Pulling into the car park and alighting from my car I could see that there was some fresh graffiti, and it had been sprayed on the big sheets of ply that had “REPLACED” the glass, as it was obviously too much to ask the local vandals to not smash all of the glass in a disused shop. I’m not innocent in this endeavour, I’ve smashed plenty of glass in my past and the closest I get to it now is breaking eggs when chucking them in the composter or throwing broken crockery in the recycle centre bins. I love smashing stuff. Anyway, back to the topic in hand, graffiti sprayed across the boards was supporting an Anti Vax point of view and opposing the government’s advice on lockdowns. I liked the fact that they’d gone to this much effort to express their opinions and wanted to capture it on my Canon’s Charge-Coupled Device Sensor.
The above image, titled “Defy” shows some shoppers walking back home past the vandalised front of the shop and shows clearly that there is some striking red colour in the image as well as the contrast of white text on black background and black text on lighter background. I was happy that fitted a few of the image ideas that I was contemplating chiefly; Derelict & Empty Shops, Covid 19 Pandemic, Shopping, Politics and Economy.
I grabbed the Nikon FM2 from it’s case and lined up to take a photo on to the Kodak Portra 135 ISO 400, I recall that the Aperture was as far open as possible on the 55mm lens at f/2.8 and shutter speed was 1/60 as the meter was telling me 1/125 was going to underexpose. It might be a bit slow, but there was nobody walking through the image when I actuated the shutter so hopefully it’ll be crisp enough.
How do Replacements make me feel?
When I first thought of the theme Replacements, I immediately brought to mind and episode of the fantastic HBO TV Series “Band Of Brothers”, which was also named Replacements. The “new guys” who have been brought in to replace fallen members of Easy Company, 101st Airborne Regiment were treated with disdain. Experienced soldiers thought them to be dangerous to know as they’d only die so kept their distance often not even learning the newcomers names.
Replacements can be seen in movies as a theme too, often not for the better. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and the more recent comedy from Edgar Wright “The World’s End” both feature an alien species attempting to colonise the earth by replacing humans with clones that don’t seem right. More often than not it ends in disaster for the replacements, whether it’s an alien takeover or a new rookie combat soldier so for me the word has more of a negative feel to it than positive.
A good question might be to wonder why a replacement has been installed into the place previously occupied by something or someone else?
Was the original object thought of as being inferior, damaged beyond repair, stolen, too old, faded, worn out, tired, not used, unsafe or even being a nuisance and being an obstruction?
When I see some new and fresher bricks on a section of block paving, it makes me wonder what happened? Was someone murdered there? Was there a post that people used to crash into when reversing? Was a tree removed and then backfilled? Why was the tree removed? Has there been a gas/water leak that needed repairing?
The same process occurs when seeing boarded up windows on shops or premises, new fence panels, signage that’s been replaced recently, bolts that have been swapped out, new bricks in old walls, new shops opening etc.
What do the Replacements think?
Obviously, most things I’m going to take a photo of are inanimate objects and don’t feel anything, they’re not able to experience emotions. (As far as we can tell) But if an object were able to articulate it’s thoughts about how it felt what general themes would they contain?
The shops either side of a newly opened store might be jealous of the newcomer with it’s sparkly new paint job and fixtures and fittings, a traffic cone put in place of a bollard might feel self conscious that it sticks out from the crowd of other bollards, whilst the surrounding pieces of wood or metal might tell you a story of their comrade being damaged or worn away and then disappearing completely before an orange and white striped intruder appeared in it’s place.
The boards in place of a window are there to stop the elements or vandals getting in to a building, but might they be concerned that the violence leading to the damaged glass might be repeated leaving them with a splintered wound? Consider the Defib in the picture below. Does it realise it has replaced an old payphone? Does it care? How might it feel about being a “cuckoo” in the phone box? Is the old standard red phone box pleased that it now has a useful, life-saving device within or does it sorely miss it’s old pal, the payphone? What of the people who used to put money into the phone to call friends, family, dealers? do they miss the good old days or is it all behind them now payphones are practically extinct due to mobile phones?
There might be other sorts of replacements that aren’t inanimate objects, a new starter in a restaurant or cafe, might feel the same concerns about what caused the previous incumbent of the role to leave. A new dog replacing a beloved family pet that’s recently been put to sleep at the vets might smell the old dog every where it goes in the house, pictures of it hanging over the new canine’s sleeping box.
Woah! Come back to reality Bob!!!
Sorry, I went off on one then, imagining the secret lives and thought processes of bricks, bollards, windows, dogs, shops and millions of other items in the world. If I proceed down the route of “replacements” as a theme for my sequence of five images, how could I convey these insecurities, or confidence and how to contextualise them so that the viewer has the ability to understand what it is I’m attempting to get across using the medium of paper and chemistry.
It’s going to be tricky to make any of the themes work for my project, but if I start losing it and imagine phone boxes arguing with defibs is that going too far??
What’s next?
My next post will contain some info on colour photographs and photographers that serve as an inspiration to me in digital and film photography. Most you will have heard of and some are new to me too. I’ve also been out with the remaining shots of 400 ISO Kodak Portra today and had the film processed, I’ll also discuss that very soon too. Phew it’s been busy… See you soon!
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