FMP Unit 6 – Jack Robinson

For this project we’ve been tasked with coming up with the theme ourselves. The concept of that worried me because I was worried I’d be overwhelmed by the freedom to choose whatever I wanted. So my first task was to narrow down what choices I had.

For me the best way to narrow ideas down is to get all of them out on paper and if the past few projects have taught me anything it’s the best way to do that is a mind map.

As you can see the mind map while presenting ideas wasn’t going well, but one idea sprouted when properly thinking about what was meant as theme I thought back to old projects and what the themes properly meant. I concluded that the themes weren’t what was in the photo but what the photo was about, but I was looking at it the opposite way around. Now with this new way of thinking I went for a new and more simplistic approach to generating ideas, just a small list.

I came up with 3 themes all very closely linked but still exploring different things. The first was stories and to me that meant the adventure being written, the process of event to paper in time with events, like someone turning their notes to a tale. The second being legacy, the idea of the time after the story, not too long that it’s a fairy tale, but long enough where that grand adventure is only remembered by pages in a book, the legacy it leaves. The last theme is Myths, the stage of a story when enough time has passed that the tale isn’t believed to be real, all that remains in the pages of the book and nothing else not known to anyone that it actually happened but believed to be just a story, a myth.

Research

The first of my photographers I’m researching is Slinkachu. Stuart Pantoll or as he’s known as online, Slinkachu is a photographer who uses miniatures, small little figurines from train sets in placement of real people. Using these miniatures he creates small scenes like snippets of a video or movie, all with the intention of telling a short story. The stories he tells through his photos try to show how melancholy it can be to live in a big city, being shown not just through the scenes but also through the titles. Once he has finished with his photoshoot he then leaves the scene there as a public art display, giving his fans to see it in person and people to just stumble upon it. By doing this he aims to make the people living in the areas he visits to be more aware of their surroundings, to notice the small details.

Now the reason I’ve chosen him for this project to research is because of his ability to tell stories through his photos, no words other than a title needed. That’s something that fascinates me and also inspires me, to be able to tell some form of story through one image is incredible, getting so much out of so little.

https://slinkachu.com

Another Photographer I’m researching is Gregory Crewsdon, Born in Brooklyn in 1962 and became interested in photography at the age of 1 when visiting the Diane Arbus retrospective at the museum of modern art. He studied and graduated from new York’s SUNY purchase school and the Yale university school of art. He now directs Graduate studies in photography at Yale. Crewsdon became interested in the narrative told by photography and how it differs from Film and writing, with it being a frozen moment in time and the open ended questions that can result from it. He likes how ambiguous the stories told from photos can be.

I’ve chosen Crewsdon for two reasons, 1 his work interests me similarly to sliknachu with telling stories through his work however crewsdon works with Human models which, in my opinion, gives his work a more emotional effect compared to Slinkachus. Having real people gives you much more control over expression and body language and that can go a long way in story telling through a visual medium.

My second reason for choosing him is his reason for taking photos for doing what he does, the interest in Narrative and stories and wanting people to be intrigued by the narrative he’s weaving speaks a lot to me. Also choosing to use photography to explore the challenges from it really interests me.

https://independent-photo.com/news/gregory-crewdson

Shoot plan 1

For this first shoot I want to focus on one of the three segments of stories I came up with, this one being legacy, the aftermath of the story. So I’m going to draw inspiration from a game I’ve been playing called Legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild.