Well, firstly welcome to my blog. As it says in the description, I'm doing a BA hons in design. AKA, film and photography.
As the title suggests, this is day one of a five day-long photography session both inside and outside of university. Today Sue, Dave and I were in the studio continuing a shoot we started last Thursday with Sue's daughter Kirsty and her friend Myra posing as models for us. As you can see from the two pictures of the girls we had a lot of fun with colour and movement. It was very hard just picking two from all the shots but I will be posting
more on Facebook after I've finished editing them
.
Before the shoot this afternoon I was in the library over at the Plas Coch site pouring over photography books with a friend. We had decided to start researching into different photographers, for me this is a chance to understand other people's take on why they point their cameras at a specific subject.
Having worked out way through numerous books, only one really stood out for me and that was the work of photographer Don McCullin. His images reflect the true extent of war, famine and disease, it's a stark comparison to our bright, cheerful shoot from today.
The book I picked out was called 'Walking with Ghosts' and there isn't an image in there that doesn't provoke some feeling inside the reader. Most are too graphic, I feel to post up on here, but here is one that speaks volumes for me, followed by a portrait of McCullin himself. The first image is of a Turkish woman who is mourning the death of her husband, a victim of the Greek-Turkish civil war it was taken in April 1964 and shows the raw emotion of the devastation war causes among the population.
The portrait of McCullin himself, I believe shows a lot of what he has seen in his eyes, and the fact that the picture has been doctored with very little adds to that feeling. To have witnessed suffering at its very worst must have had some toil on his emotions. In a recent interview with BBC's John Tusa, when asked 'are you at peace with yourself?' McCullin replied: 'Not totally, but I'm trying to move in that direction because I... I need the freedom of those ghastly memories. I need to get away from that, and I need to go forward into a new direction, you know, one that offers sunlight in respect.'
I think that this speaks volumes about the difficulty faced by photographers who witness war, famine and disease and the effects that ricochet throughout the societies and cultures affected.
Looking forward to tomorrow :)
