For this exercise, we were asked to select an item which had a story attached to it. Siddhi’s object was a bracelet which she lost in a hotel but was later found by her friend in a second hand shop. I selected a plastic container of a single milk portion which I took from the tea-tray in my hotel. We decided to collaborate as we both personified the objects we had selected, imagining them witnessing private experiences within the hotel. Inspired by our peers who spoke about culture shock and moving to London for the first time, as well as thinking about the fast-paced aspects of modern day life and social media, we wanted to feature people in their personal and private spaces.
Musing over various ideas, we began by planning and producing a series of photographs of various people in their personal spaces – deciding to focus particularly on bedrooms and private spaces where the room itself would become the voyeur. The concept was to capture real people in their own space and create dramatised narratives to accompany the images which could eventually be developed into a digital magazine or fashion film.
Magazine prototype Magazine prototype
Below are the images we captured in the initial shoot. We wanted these imagined situations to have an uncanny aspect to them and although we were only shooting one person, we tried to use techniques to suggest the presence of ‘the other’ through hands reaching in from outside the frame and references to selfie culture.
We created mock ups of how to magazine layout would look and imagined a combination of real anthropological journalism and theatrical visual content to tread the line between fantasy and reality.
Mock up of magazine layout Mock up of magazine layout Mock up of magazine layout