Initial Ideas...

When thinking about costs of living, I feel that emotions play a big part of this, and thought that I could have a series of portraits of people showing different emotions. While you could expect that they would all be negative, I think that having positive images would still fit the theme. For example, someone laughing would be a positive image, but would show laughter lines, which show the cost of living. However, I could go the opposite way, and show the positivity of life.
This image by Garry Winogrand 'Woman with Ice-Cream Cone' (1968), is the sort of shot I would like to take.

 

I like the idea of doing the project based around people being lost, or alone. For example, I thought that I could do people getting lost in a crowd, or standing out from the crowd. I had different ideas of how I could go about this:

-        -  A young, tattooed person, or group, in a group of OAPs

-         - Someone sitting alone in a shopping centre, isolated, even though they are surrounded by people

-         - Shots of people in the same outfit, but in different spaces, in different groups, with their expression suggesting that they aren’t happy, or don’t feel at home. This would suggest that people all have a place to belong, but I would be focusing on the fact that not everyone feels that they are where they belong.

Initial Ideas...

I thought of doing the project based around damage to the body, for example, going to the skate park in Brighton and photographing people, or an individual, and documenting any damage they do to their bodies. Although unlikely, I could also attempt to find an individual or group of people that do Parkour. I could also follow around someone with a disability, and show their struggles.
Jeremy & Claire Wiess' image of a skateboarder is the sort of image I could use:

Diane Arbus' image of the tallest man in the world, at that point, documents his difference to his family, and his struggle to live a normal life.  

Brighton Field Trip

This week in our workshop we went into Brighton in order to practive taking portraits.
First we got into pairs, and practiced taking portraits of our partner, ensuring they took up a third of the frame and that the background was out of focus. While I was not 100% successful doing this, these are the best photos that I took, which do demonstrate these skills to some extent.

  

We also went into town, and approached people to take their picture. Unfortunately, this lead to many refusals, which meant that I didn't manage to get a large number of photos. However, I did get some of people doing their jobs and so on.

 

After this field trip, I realised how difficult it's going to be approaching people for the project, and even harder getting them to agree to be in it.

Initial Ideas

One idea that comes to mind when thinking of the costs of living is old age. I like the idea of taking images of an old person, who clearly shows the years, and what they’ve gone through. I could take an image of an old woman, and concentrate on her wrinkles, on her face, hands and so on. I could also focus on her doing simple everyday tasks, and document the difficulty she has in doing these.
For example, in Hayley Leonard's 'Nan's Hands' (2004), we cant see the woman, but we can see that she is an old woman that looks after herself. She is sat in a relaxed pose. I could go the opposite way to this, and concentrate on her hands when she is doing a simple task that she finds particularly difficult.

Another idea that comes to mind is focusing on a career that documents the cost of living. This could be anything from an undertaker, whose career is based around death, the ultimate cost of living, to a street cleaner, focussing on the cost of people living on the environment.