The word home and what it links to varies between different people. Most people would link home with a geographical location or a place where there is shelter. However, I see my version of home much different to most people. I like to think of home as being interior rather than exterior; my version of home is my body, my freedom of movement and my thoughts. From a very young age I have done gymnastics and trampolining and I still continue do it now. Being able to fly through the air and move my body in sequence is incredible to me; it’s a huge rush of adrenaline and power that feels great. Gymnastics is practically my second home for me, but my body is the vessel that allows me to love my home and to manifest there.
I thought that I would take an experimental turn for my Home brief. My idea was to do gymnastics at my gym where had access to the whole of it. Firstly I thought of the idea to get someone to take photographs of doing gymnastics such as flips and other sequences. This idea was too difficult in terms of when I get access to the gymnasium and how I would construct it. My second ideas was to work with some long exposure movement photography. I could not do this in the gymnasium as I needed a controlled environment and controlled lighting in order to achieve the results that I wanted. I have always been mesmerised with long exposure photography, so I thought that it would be the perfect opportunity for me experiment with it. When I came to doing my long exposure movement photography it didn’t work the way I wanted it to. This was because I didn’t have access to the right equipment and the right environment to conduct it. By being in my first year I has certain limitations on what equipment I could take out and what rooms I had access to. I had to accommodate by using standard household lights and using a seminar room with a decent amount of room in it.
The issues that I faced were that the lighting wasn’t good and that the room was not suitable as there was too much light filtering through the edges of the windows even though I tried my best to cover it up with black fabric. My long exposure photography didn’t work so I had to change up my idea in the heat of the moment. What I did instead was put the camera on a fast shutter speed and got someone to capture me at the right moment while I’m doing gymnastics or dance. This worked really well, even though it wasn’t what I wanted. I had a plethora of images of me doing gymnastics, so I pieced them together in Photoshop and gave in the illusion of a long exposure/ conceptual photographic piece.
I recently discovered the fantastic work of Lois Greenfield and I’m so glad I had a change to look at her work. To a lot of people it’s just simple dance photography, but to me it’s all about expression, strength, grace and freedom of the body. The motion of the subject and the props they’re using really appealed to my interest. Lois specialises in dance photography but not long exposure movement photography, none the less it gave me huge inspirations for my Home brief.
Rosie Hardy is a truly unique photographer. Rosie focuses on conceptual photography, her work resembles fantasy, nature and things that seems rather ethereal. A lot of her work expresses raw emotion, each piece is something to be valued. Rosie Hardy gets inspiration from a range of things; her ideas are built up from an array of images that she has seen in her head from all sorts of places. The whole idea of conceptual photography peaks my interest so she was an artist I had to research. Most of her work is done in Photoshop and other image editing software. I took some inspiration from her as I had to use Photoshop to edit my sires of images.
