An Assesment and a (slightly) new direction...

I have decided to try and assess where to go from here with this project. The issues I have been having with trying to capture travelling in the UK and shooting portraits of the characters you meet along the way have been very difficult to overcome, especially within the restraints of the course and the time limits imposed upon the project. However, I feel that if I take a slightly different direction with my project I can produce some more interesting and varied work.

The Idea!

Basically, using big, motorway service stations has proved to be nearly impossible. The problem is that they are too mainstream, and as a result they have polices and rules in place which stop me in my tracks when I am trying to produce portraiture of staff. Aside from this also, the subjects which I have access to are not especially eye catching...it could just be any old McDonalds or coffee shop chain!

To produce more interesting work, I have decided to try getting off the motorways and travelling using A roads in search of diners and roadside food stops which are either independently run or part of a smaller chain where the rules and staff will be much more relaxed and probably more interesting to photograph!

I have noticed in my research that the best photographs taken whilst travelling are often shot in the little unusual places travellers come across and that are not often seen, which is the opposite to motorway services. I have begun to realise that to capture the spirit of road travel I need to avoid the larger, more corporate places.

So that's where I plan to steer my project from now on, in an attempt to avoid all the problems I have been having to date, and to find some more interesting subjects!

David Zaitz - A little more travel photography research...

David Zaitz is an American photographer and I have been looking at his images from his travels across America, with particular focus on portraiture of people working in the various shops, garages and diners he uses.

 

 

 

I really like Zaitz images for their vibrant colour and brightness, they really capture the joy of his journey and the characters of the people he's met on his travels - I think they're great!

Shoot Three Continued...

So I decided to take a different, more canidid approach to shooting portraits in the service stations, and this is what I came up with:

I think that these images are more interesting than the posed portraits from Shoot Two, and I didn't get stopped by any security or managing staff! However, they're not really what I was going for with this project. I wanted a more intimate look at people that work on and use the roads in the UK and these photos are a bit detached and documentative.  

Street Photography Research

One alternative I have thought of is approaching portraiture in a more candid way. To help me with this, I have done a little bit of research on Street Photography with a focus on more candid photographs.

Firstly, Richard Bram:

 

 

 

Next I looked at Alan Wilson:

It seems that to make a candid portrait successful it needs to have an element of humour or juxtaposition that gives it an edge. I like these images because they have something that stands out, whether it be black juxtaposed with white, or the placement of a subject next to a poster adding humour.

I will try and take elements of this work and incorporate it into my next trip to the services! 

Shoot Three...that never happened!

I decided that maybe I had just had a bad experience with Shoot Two and I thought that I should try again...and this failed miserably. I travelled a little way down the M1 from Leicester at about 7pm and stopped at three service stations, and asked about 4 members of staff at each, and every single one, without fail, declined my request to take a portrait of them, due to fears of breaking the company policies and troubles with managers.

This further enforces what I said in my previous post, and I think I am going to have to take a different approach.

Shoot Two

Having decided on a developed idea for a shoot I followed through with my plan to visit service stations on my way down from Leicester to Devon, late at night.

I feel that, although these images technically achieve what I wanted to do, they are not very interesting at all. I didn't feel I could be creative and felt very uneasy being there. Out of the dozen or so people I asked, these two subjects are the only ones that actually said yes when I asked them whether I could take their photograph, and even when they accepted they didn't seem very keen and were extremely wary of managers and permissions. This really put me in a difficult position and it made it all the more unnerving to ask anyone else for a picture. So it seems despite the lateness of my travelling you can't escape the 'red tape' of modern corporations when it comes to the media!

Solutions?

Although I offered every one of my participants a letter explaining my project and what I intended to use the photographs for on headed paper from the university, many people seemed reluctant to have their picture taken. I noticed that mostly, the reason for this was not because they didn't want to, but felt that they would not be allowed to appear in any work of mine due to pressure from the managers and company policies.

One solution could be to phone or write ahead, to obtain permissions to do portraits of staff working for certian roadside companies. However, in practice, for the purposes of my university project work this would not really be feasible, as the relevant managers and directors may take a long time to respond, and even if they do they may decline, which would not be ideal especially considering the deadlines imposed by my course. Although I think this would probably be the only approach that would work if I were to carry out a project similar in the future.

I will not give up though!!

Transitional Spaces Film

This is the film that was produced using my groups footage from the transitional spaces project right at the beginning of the course.

Having done my research, it seems I have come back a full circle to the idea of road travel and visiting service stations as a transitional space.



Filmed: Sam, Heather & Sonam
Edited: Robin, Tim & Annie

SHOOT TWO!! Planning and Ideas...

Having done a fair amount of research since my last shoot I feel that I have developed and built on my ideas enough to think about a second. In this post I will outline my themes and shot ideas, to go out and shoot...

THEMES:


- Travel

- On the road

- TRANSITIONAL SPACES!! 

- Discovery

- Travellers

SHOT IDEAS:

- Exterior/interior shots of motorway services/petrol stations and other key transitional spaces within the theme of road travel

- Evening/night/early morning light - Crewdson style!


- Vehicles, moving and stationary

- PEOPLE! Staff/drivers/passengers - people that either travel for a living and use the UK road network
   
How will I achieve this? What's the plan...?
This weekend I plan on driving home, from Leicester to South Devon, travelling late at night on the motorways. From past experience I know I will be passing many service stations and fuel stops, and these will be perfect for my shoot ideas. Travelling late at night means there will be fewer people around, but enough to provide me with subjects to shoot for portraits, and there will be less interruptions when I am shooting my exterior shots.

Hopefully I will be able to gather a few images to help with my development, and have the beginnings of an interesting project!

Liam Eyers

I have been looking further into the people that are part of the experience of travelling, and started looking at work created a little nearer to home. I came across this series named "Little Chef" made by Liam Eyers. The project looks into documenting the various Little Chef chain restaurants he visited during his time travelling through England.

I like this series for it's portrayal and representation of the faces behind something so many of us see so regularly. These faces that are an important part of every motorway journey, but are so easily forgotten, are immortalised in Eyers' photographs, which I find extremely interesting.

 

This body of work has been very influential on me, and I am beginning to plan my next shoot, taking into account my research and ideas to date.

Andrew Bush

I really like this series of work by Andrew Bush, named "Vector Portraits." The work examines the relationship between American's and their cars, and how they represent many of the ideals in culture; freedom, mobility and independence. By attaching a camera to the passenger side of his car, Bush almost intrudes of the occupant's space, and presents a very real view of a culture of travel.

A lot of travel photography deals with the places visited and the things seen whilst on the road, but Bush's is different in the way that it deals with people and the portraits give an interesting element to something which is sometimes overlooked - the people doing the travelling!

Stephen Shore

"Until I was twenty-three, I lived mostly in a few square miles in Manhattan. In 1972, I set out with a friend for Amarillo, Texas. I didn't drive, so my first view of America was framed by the passenger window. It was a shock."

This is the work of Stephen Shore, and his quotation at the start of the post had a big effect on me. I have always loved travel and driving, and I have always found long journeys fascinating. Whilst researching work with a travel theme, I was struck by Shore's simplistic but very well thought out image of his America. I think the images have captured the essence of his journey, and give an insight into what he experienced in this new and exciting world of life on the road.

He documented his trip and shoots as he travelled, which I find really interesting. I think it would be really interesting to document a trip or travel as a theme, but look out for Crewdson style lighting and colour along the way.

Birgitta Lund - "In Transit"

 

I really find this series of travel photography by Birgitta Lund very interesting. Named "In Transit", Lund's work represent's her journey from Copenhagen to America, specifically New York where she studied. I was drawn to the series when I saw it in an online photography magazine article, by the first image I have added to this post. I loved the neon colours and the yellow of the taxis under it, and it reminded me of Crewdson's work, although her images come from a very different place, away from his heavily controlled movie style sets.

I am beginning to be very drawn to the idea of travel and movement, especially on the road. This fits very nicely into the transitional spaces theme, and is something I would definitely like to explore...