“At 19, I’d never known anyone who had died, with the exception of my grandfather, who’d been old and far away. I’d never been to a funeral. I understood nothing of that kind of loss – of the crumbling of the physical texture of lives lived, the way the meaning of a place could change because those who used to be in it were no longer there. I knew nothing about the hopelessness and the necessity of trying to capture such lives – to rescue them, to keep them from vanishing altogether.”
After my tutorial with Matthew, he suggested I go and photograph the houses and place where the collectors keep their collections, and reveal to the public how this is both a normal, and obsessive thing to do. It became clear during the tutorial that I am collector myself, and was in denial about owning this collecting. I own 2,000 beanie babies that are scattered around my house, in boxes in the attic and around my room. It would be interesting as experimentation to photograph how these people keep their belongings, if they are a big part of their lives, or something they want to keep.
Miranda Hutton is a big inspiration for photographing rooms, after he series titled "The Room's Project", which explores how parents keep the rooms of their children who have died, the same as when they were here. Her work is interesting and has inspired me greatly in terms of actually shooting the series, as she photographs different rooms, but using the same measurements of tripod height and camera angle.
The titles are also very relevant to my work, as they reveal to the viewer much more about who we are looking at rather than what. All of the images are titled in the same way, documenting how long ago they died, when the photograph was taken, and what series it was part of. This would give the viewer content and understanding in a gallery space, and is something I need to think about when presenting my work.
http://www.mirandahutton.co.uk/projects/the-rooms-project/
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