Themes, Proccess and Reflection

Section 1 

In 250 words describe your project and its key themes:

The aim of my project was to present the sub genres of people that we have in our culture who are the most stereotyped in a way that adheres to our cultures expectations. By presenting these stereotypes in the over the top way that they are perceived and by including the iconic trademarks of the stereotypes which are so engrained in our culture I wanted the viewer to see just how ridiculous these presumptions are. I wanted my photographs to be both iconic and symbolic. My subjects are presented as iconic of the stereotypes and other parts of the photo are symbolic of the stereotypes emotions and values. ‘Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked.’ (2012, p.349). My iconic stereotypes are informed by a combination of mediums, they are well known images in our culture represented and reinforced through our history, films, literature, magazine articles, music and art. When the viewer of my photographs identifies the stereotype they draw on a number of references both from our collective memory but also from their personal experience. Perhaps they draw on a friend of theirs who they attribute to that stereotype. Often this connection being made, this person or event being remembered is an arbitrary and subconscious link. Even without titles or captions the viewer would immediately attribute the subjects to a stereotype that shows how moulded we are to our collective consciousness genres and how easily we put people in to boxes.

Section 2

In 250 words describe the process of taking and editing your work:

I used my Nikon D90 an 18-105mm DX lens and a tripod. I used varying manual settings for each shot with different aperture, white balance and iso-settings. For some shots I used natural lighting and for some I used small amounts of extra artificial lighting to reinforce lighting that was already in the room like table lights. For instance in ‘The Nerd’ I placed a phone with it’s torch light on leaning up against the laptop screen invisible to the viewer due to its positioning. This made it look like the lighting on one side of ‘The Nerds’ face was from the laptop screen alone. For ‘The Goth’ I waited for the light not to be too bright before taking the shots because I wanted the dark and gloomy aesthetic. For ‘The Stoner’ I changed the white balance so that the picture had more of a warmer tinge whilst on the ‘The Nerd’ I changed it the other way so it had less of an orange hue. I then cropped the photos on Photoshop to fit the standard landscape or portrait aspect ratio’s. This factor was important such as in ‘The Goth’ where more gravestones would be visible in the background with a landscape.  I also tried to crop my photos whilst paying attention to the rule of thirds and the Fibonacci spiral. Finally I tweaked the brightness, contrast and saturation in Photoshop. In ‘The Stoner’ I tweaked with the sharpness to make his facial expression crisper.

Section 3

In 500 words please write a commentary to introduce and reflect upon your images:

My first picture in my series I took was of the ‘Posh Boy’. The Barbour jacket and gun I thought was most iconic of the posh boy as the brand word ‘Barbour’ alone is symbolic of money and pompousness and a gun is symbolic of hunting and a hidebound ideology. I had him turning his nose up because I thought it was a classic snobbish expression; this alongside the camera angle gave the impression he was looking down on the viewer. The side-on positioning I thought is reminiscent of Greek statues that sought for a noble, elitist look. I situated the ‘Goth Girl’ in a graveyard because it is symbolic of the values and emotions that are attributed to Goths such as sadness and death. I wanted the morbid expression on her face to have a hint of rebelliousness because we think of Goths as an anarchic youth culture. For ‘The Nerd’ shot I wanted him to adhere to the iconic maths, science nerd image and a part of the stereotype that has evolved into our collective memory in the last 20 years is the idea of the Asian maths boffin. I did this reluctantly because I think its sickening that in western culture a part of the nerd stereotype is an ethnicity but I wanted to highlight that this set up isn’t satirical of nerds or Asians but of the whole way that our culture stereotypes. I wanted to put forward the notion that our cultural conscious will easily evolve a stereotype into a racial stereotype and attribute a race to a stereotype that I think is pathetic. I used John Thompson’s photos of London’s poor as inspiration because I felt that each of them had a narrative to them. He would focus on different job roles or groups of people reinforcing archetypes such as ‘the sweep’, ‘the chair-mender’ and ‘the seller of shellfish’ and I thought this was similar to how I wanted to identify different stereotypes. He would juxtapose his photographs with text written by Adolphe Smith to put into his ‘Street Life in London’ magazine. In my blog (see bibliography) you will see similar captions to this that I have added on to my photos that I wanted to be humorous in how ridiculously over the top they are. The reason that I didn’t include these in the images that I uploaded for the assessment was that I wanted the viewers to identity without prompt what stereotypes they were. This proves how easily our cultural conscious identifies them. I wanted the viewer to conjure up their own narratives when they see the photos like I did to prove that our assumptions are ridiculous. In the same way that ‘collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating’ (2003, p.86), if the viewer of my photos comes away thinking that at least one of the pictures is too over the top to be true then they are denouncing the authenticity of their societies agreed upon categories.

Bibliography

Murakami, H (2012) 1Q84. Vintage books publishing.

Sontag, S (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Thompson J and Smith A (1994) Victoria London Street Life in Historic Photographs. Dover Publications.