Critical review: When one looks again
When starting on this project I wanted to do something new and explore my own boundaries. After walking in the dark for some time and doing some research my thoughts began to form around being the viewer looking in at a space. I wanted to express how a public space could change at different times of day in various scenarios, and present it in a sterile and simplistic way. This would require me to get out of the safe and tempting environment called home and find locations and stay there until something happened. After travelling around my Idea fell on using working around buss-stops.
I started my work brain storming and writing a mindmap. After looking into three different ideas, I settled on bus stops and documenting them from an outsiders perspective, the reason for this was because at the time I was new in England and did not want to get all up and personal with the Englishmen. After doing some shoots on black and white film for the first time the results ended up pretty close to what I originally wanted. But after more research I wanted to get more personal.“You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you”(Lee Friedlander, Documentary Photography – LIFE Library of Photography, Page 178)
Friedlanders work reflects himself as a person, and has that personal communication which you could not find in my first prints. Rather than camping on the other side of the street with a telelens, I was now taking photos of people up close, talking to some of them before shooting or silently do some snaps. This was the direction I wanted to go with my project.
At this point I had started looking through the work of Tom Wood. Whilst his work was brilliant, It was sort of demotivating seeing his “All zones off peak” book which basically was a perfected version of what I was trying to do. “I’m not trying to
document anything, I am asking a question. “(Tom…