Hidden City Shoot One
Artists Research
Planning
Canning Town
Beckton
Our task for Street Photography Shoot 1 is to go to our local area and take photos of people working in their workspaces.
Personally, I want to go to Canning Town, Beckton and Plaistow. Here, I will specifically target retail workers in their shops.
In addition, I want to target people that are often hidden and not viewed as important in society. Some examples would be Postmen/women and Binmen/women.
My own objective is to be able to use the different functions on the camera that I don't usually use to take clear and crisp photography of working people.
This shoot will be inspired by Shirley Baker as she took candid photographs in portrait. She captured the essence of people going about their day as though they were not being photographed.
Also, this work is inspired by the fashion photographer, Hemut Newton. His work is based around society's views of people at the time.
Productions and final results
The photographs were very strongly inspired by Shirley Baker and the way her work was in the street. For the left hand picture we see as postman in the area he is delivering in and this specific image reminded me of Baker's work. The bottom two photographs were very strong in a sense that they blended really well in photographs showing themselves in their natural working environments. The idea behind these were to strongly show people in their places of work.
I decided I would only go locally so I can see the minorities and large quantities of specific people in my area and see if I can show these.
The photograph on the left is really strong and sharp which succeeded.
The photographs on the right are really strong in terms of meeting the ideas concepts and requirements.
The final shoot was successful even though I did not follow my specific plan. I went to my local area just opposite the college to a corner shop and also Beckton area. I did go further and go to my locations but they were not successful, as no one would allow me to take pictures of them.The shoot of the corner shop allowed me to take photos of 2 different people in different positions. These were not particularly good images as they were not close enough to the face to claim it as a portrait. The only good things about the images here are the fact that they are natural and have a strong contrast.
The second sets of photos are the postman with letters and I approached him nice enough for him to pose naturally and get really close to his face.
‘This photo is showing a good sense of expression and contrast of light with the environment they work in’-Iqra.
The good things about the whole shoot is the development of skills with the camera such as aperture and also focusing. Also developing my people skills and choosing people wisely.