Main Project: Displaced Cultures

Project Brief:

Produce a series of 6 to 8 digital photographs that investigate ideas of representation and identity of a cultural, social or political place (i.e. an individual, a community, a location etc.). Your chosen theme must be presented for acceptance by your tutor. 

Practice
Your theme must be planned, researched and explored technically, visually, conceptually in order to create 6 to 8 individual yet connected narratives, forming your photographic essay. This will require you to approach the theme in an experimental approach and over a series of shoots, so that the aesthetic decisions become informed. All images must be produced by you. Where appropriate you should obtain written clearance from any contributors to your project. 

Critical
Your project will demonstrate a comprehensive and critical approach, addressing some of the key ideas derived from the readings, discussions and presentations from this module, as well as from your research as whole. It is important that you can support and contextualise any decisions made through references and the use of bibliography.

Points to consider:
• The essence of the project must not be centred on our campus, you need to go out into the community a find a subject that is new to you. 
• Your final piece should engage its audience. 
• You will be encouraged to think critically about how you represent people and place. 
• You should be aware of stereotyped views and be prepared to make informed comment regarding all areas of subject choice. 
• You should research existing imagery of people and place connected to your project and find what the unusual/unexpected view is.


Planning the Project

From reading the brief, I had very little idea as to what to base my project on, since there was minimal constraints to the brief, it was hard to think of what angle I could approach this project with. I decided the best way to go about it was to go on photo shoots to various locations outside of university campus and find any connections in my images that I gathered. This approach to my project was aided in some of the workshop tasks, as well as myself going into Brighton town and even in the Canary Islands. 

[PHOTO SHOOTS AVAILABLE ON ALTERNATE BLOGS]

Through these photo shoots, I got a firm understanding with using DSLR cameras such as the Nikon D7000 and Nikon D40X. To see the outcome of these photo shoots, they're available on alternate blog posts. 

Once I had a vast array of photos to chose from, I then thought of themes and ideas that were represented and identifiable within the images. 



Deciding the Project Theme:

My favourite collection of photos in which I'd gathered were from my photo shoots in Tenerife. I had a large collection of photos to chose from simply because  more photos were gathered from this photo shoot, as the other photo shoots hadn't lasted more than a day. From my photos from Tenerife, I had used my sister's camera had a 15-45mm lens with s smaller range of f-stops, lowers levels of ISO, it basically wasn't as good a quality a camera or lens as the Nikon D7000. 
Upon my photo shoot in Tenerife, I thoroughly thoroughly looked through the selection I had compiled whilst I was out there but couldn't think of theme that could be related between the images. It wasn't until I showed my sister that she pointed out how many various cultures there are in Tenerife due to the increase of tourism over the decades. 
I soon began to realise that in a quite a  few of my photos, there was an expression of culture that didn't belong to the Canarian culture. It seemed peculiar, odd and displaced from where it had originated, especially since I had been going to this same part of Tenerife for the past 18 years, I'd seen the transformation. The photos below are my selected photos which I believe portray cultures that where the most distant and displaced from Canarian culture.

It was from here I realised my theme should be surround the 'displaced' cultures currently present in Tenerife. To reinforce this message of displaced culture within my photo collection, I would edit my images through the method of data bending. This would distort the colours, textures and format of the photos which would physically distort the images. 

Now I had a better understanding of what my project was going to be about, I would chose a selection of images to data bend, make 3 different data bent versions of each image and put them up on one of my social media cites and get people to vote which one out of the 3 they thought represented the idea of displaced culture.

PHOTO SHOOTS AVAILABLE ON ALTERNATE BLOGS

Editing Project Photos: Data Bending

When you data bend an image, you are corrupting the bytes in coding script of the jpg files. From a previous workshop, I had learnt how to do this via opening the image through TextEdit, I data bent each of my 6 images about 6 times each, and put a selection of 3 edits of each original photo onto my Facebook for my friends and peers to help me with my selection for my project gallery. Each image took around 10-15 to code and some of the outcomes I got were disastrous as you proportions of the image were either lost, blacked out or completely disfigured, you couldn't identify anything from the original photo. Therefore, it took me hours to get this array of photos! But it was worth it.

After putting the images on Facebook, I received loads of positive feedback on the album. I asked people to vote for their favourite edits and I chose the most popular selections to be part of my final piece. I thought I wouldn't need to put any effects via PhotoShop CS6 on my photos since the colours and construction of the images were distorted.

 

Final Piece & Conclusion

After a long amount of consideration and discussion with my fellow peers on my photography course as well as my friends via social media, I chose my final project images to be these 6 images below as I believe (with reinforced evidence from my peers) that these are my best selection of edited photos for my final project which portray the theme of displaced culture. Overall, I found this quite a challenging task, and wish I could approach the project again at a different angle since I'm much more confident with my camera skills and editing skills too. If I could of had more time for the course module, I would've like to have tested different lens with the Nikon D7000 or learnt more advanced editing skills on PhotoShop CS6 since I barely had to use it for my main photography project.