Tuesday, 25 January 2011

The Reality Construct (December 2010 - January 2011)

 Media: 120mm Medium Format black and white film.

What is reality? My reality is completely different to your reality.
What is space? Space can be anything. As I began to learn.

Everyone grows up experiencing their own childhood.
A lot of my memories involve a particular park that was always a part of my childhood. For this project I decided to photograph this particular park, but through my eyes. Things have changed over the years, the play area is now a modernised version of what it used to be. The trees may have been cut differently and some completely taken out, but my memories still exist. Whilst photographing these areas of the park, I was reminded of certain memories that I had forgotten about. During my research into my hometown and the area around the park, I found out about a "forgotten" railway that ran through Ipswich. It was used to transfer bricks/clay to Felixstowe, mainly. My Grandad hand drew me a map of what the railway line may have looked like through his & a friend's eyes. This map seemed to receive a lot of interest from university peers and tutors.
I photographed in the snow at first, being my first time using Medium Format I was very wary as to how any of my films would turn out! I also photographed during the day after all of the snow had melted.
I chose my snow photographs for 8 out of 10 of my final images. Snow is an interesting medium and has meaning in itself. The snow was covering most of the landscape in my photos, which I found interesting. What was the snow covering up? Memories? Traces of journeys? Maybe even someone's life journey? Which then bought me back to the "forgotten" railway, how much is forgotten over time?
I thought it made sense to involve my Grandad's hand drawn map in my final images, I blurred one of the photos of the map on a desk, because this is the way he sees the history, it's not his memory and his view on it is blurred. I also chose to overlay and print the hand drawn map on top of a photograph of the map. It worked out much better than expected.

Here are my 10 final images:










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