An idea I am going to experiment with is documenting my life in lockdown. To do this, I am going to look at items in the house. These will be everyday items that show how mine and my families lives have changed in lockdown. Nigel Shafran’s work has been a big influence on this shoot. It allowed me to look at the things I see often in a different way. I thought about how in Shafron’s photos I began really looking at what was in the frame and what it said about him. This helped me when I was going around my house deciding what to photograph. In some rooms it was a bit dark, but using the light from windows like in Shafron’s work was more effective than if I had used any artificial light.
This was an interesting shoot for me to do. I was documenting things I see everyday and so I had the mindset that I was someone else, to be able to shoot from a different perspective. The shoot was successful, I focused on a few objects in each image and I realised now the significance of each one.
The first photos were of my items I had bought back from university. University for me, was the first thing that was affected by Coronavirus. I had to come back from university quite unexpected and so I had loads of belongings that just got dumped in my house with no where for it to go.
The next images look at other things my household have had to adapt to. The first two images just looks like a messy room but for me it shows more. My boyfriend has moved in with little notice and so we have squeezed so much stuff in a small room. The next two photos show something we have been doing a lot of recently, gardening. There is ‘with sympathy’ cards in the last image. Unfortunately this is a part of Coronavirus that too many people will experience.
I have never photographed ‘the everyday’ before but I realise it can make you think more imaginatively when photographing. Technically, this shoot wasn’t too difficult. Some rooms were a lot brighter than other but I kept a wide aperture and increased the shutter speed. I used a shallow depth of field to isolate certain objects from the background. The soft focus in the background is more aesthetically pleasing.
The photographs are successful but I realise they mean so much more to me than anyone else viewing them. To someone else these are just random objects in a house. For this reason, I am not going to carry on with this idea. Also as I’m stuck in one house so it would start to get repetitive.
Lucy Davis 