About Me

I am interested in furthering my study of photography at university, especially at Manchester Metropolitan. I feel your course can offer me the ability to learn an exciting range of contemporary skills and crafts based techniques. I am interested in all sorts of photography and your course “enables a wide range of diverse approaches to photography” which really appeals to me because I am open minded and eager to learn a vast range of new information and am prepared to take a diverse approach to my work. I am interested in Manchester, the city itself. I feel it is a vibrant city full of culture and I look forward to looking at art and photography at Manchester Art Gallery, Corner House and Lowry Centre. I would like the opportunity to photograph Manchester as it is a fascinating city which combines industrial archaeology and modern architecture. I am a fan of tableau photography as I enjoy the staging of an image and constructing something that’s personal to me. This ties in with my passion for film. I love French new wave cinema and the work of Jean Luc Godard.  After watching his film Breathless I went on to do some photography in the style of French new wave cinema. I am also really inspired by film and literature. For example the book Coming Up For Air by George Orwell influenced me to take a personal series of photographs outside of my college work inspired by my childhood. I have read David Campany’s book film and photography, and this has also added strongly to my contextual knowledge of photography and film. I have also studied the classic Susan Sontag, On Photography, and I have begun to engage more systematically with the study of the history of photography.

Book Covers

Here I collected together a set of books about photography that I had accumulated over some time and scanned the covers on the computer and digitally montaged them together. The key image shows Man Ray observing a woman (the male gaze). The three montages reflect the way that women are used as objects in photography and advertising.

Personal Project -Coming Up For Air

After reading Coming Up For Air by George Orwell I was inspired to take some photos outside of my college work. The book is about a man (George Bowling) who has become bored of his own dreary life and feels he is suffocating. He returns to his childhood home in search of his true self. This is exactly what I decided to do. The photographs I took are of areas where I used to play when I was a child. When I went back I found that the areas had all overgrown and there was litter everywhere etc. The work represents the naivety and innocence of childhood but growing up only to find the disappointing reality that life sometimes offers. Once I had taken the photographs I put them together with some quotes from the book. The quotes I sourced were connected to nostalgia and the past.

French New wave

After watching a French new-wave film called Breathless I was inspired to go out and take images in the style of the movie. I have studied French New Wave directors: Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais and Louis Maille. In these photographs I am trying to capture the feel and mood of the period.