Docomentary Proposal

For this project we have been looking at different types and styles of documentary photography, including architectural photography - which was the style I most liked using: no talking to strangers and no stalking. Because I enjoyed this style much more, it is the style I will be using to take my final images.

I would like to photograph art works around Leeds. Art is often ignored is it’s not bright or in your face. The city center is full of hidden, unnoticed works - especially on and around Victorian buildings, which will be something I focus heavily on. There are quite a few figures on buildings, and I plan to use them to form the bulk of my work. I would like to show that the figures/art are constantly ignored by the busy inner city workers, and hopefully find some things I didn’t know about before.

Looking at Eugene Atget, I quite like the idea of documenting for future reference and for the sake of documenting, to help protect the buildings/art for the future. His photographs give a profound sense of what was there, this is something I'd like to try to copy by showing both the building/s and the area.

Given that Atgets’ images were all black-and-white, although not through choice, I would like to edit the photos I take to a similar intensity of grey; that look like a reasonably realistic black-and-white edit. I will do this in Photoshop using the black-and-white layer, and then the burn and dodge tools to create a more 3D looking picture, emphasising the light and shadow of the pictures.

I shall try to involve some sort of context by including people, cars, buses etc. in the images, to make it discernible that they have been taken in a busy city. However, while keeping the parts of the environment in the pictures, I would like to be sensitive to towards the age of and effort involved in much of the work.

The skills for these sculptures have, not so much been lost, but neglected, so almost all the sculptures are old. These sculptures and facades are often all that’s left of many a Victorian building where much, if not all, the inner moulding have been ripped out and modernised and the floors ripped out and doubled.

I already have a rough idea of how I might layout my photo's, I will have a pillars or similar at the bottom, drawing the eye to any landscape images I use. This will be similar to the layout I used for Dervyn's studio assignment last year, albeit without the jokey twist.