ASSIGNMENT ONE SUBMISSION: LOCAL COMMUNITIES

Produce a small photo essay of 10 images that demonstrates your engagement with the lives, experiences and histories of your local community and its people. Decide on a single theme, topic or activity to focus on. Do this assignment with only one camera and one lens.

Provide a short commentary (200 words) explaining your ethos and rationale along with your images (Open College of the Ats, 2014:31).

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NICOLA SOUTH STUDENT NUMBER: 514516

PROVISIONING AND PROTECTING

COMMENTARY

This theme of this photo essay is of my family isolating at home during the “lock down” of Covid19. My choice of subject was driven by the lockdown necessitated by the world-wide pandemic and the adjustments that myself and my immediate family made as we became a physically isolated community. Though the images may appear straight forward they represent my personal response to the suddenly imposed conditions, and the threat of both the pandemic and the isolation to my family. My intention is to share how my attention was initially funnelled to providing what my community would need to survive in an uncertain situation and protecting us; provisioning and protecting.

My concept was to communicate the protection and adjustments that I built for my community but also the isolation and barriers that I was feeling. I was also suffering from being separated from the place that my soul calls home, my second home 220 miles away that I was forbidden to visit. My visual strategy developed from these personal reactions to the situation.

The windows of my house represent physical barriers between the world outside and inside, as well as emotional ones. The subjects photographed through my windows, though mundane, will be familiar to others who have lived through this time. I hope that viewers will connect to these images through their shared experience of the time, using their imagination and experiences to ascribe exact meanings for them, as they trigger their own responses to this shared situation.

Reference:

Open College of the Arts (2014) Photography 2: Documentary-Fact and Fiction (Course Manual). Barnsley: Open College of the Arts

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ARTIST STATEMENT

This work shares my experience of isolating at home with my family during Covid 19. The subjects on view are those that I fixated on initially in my personal battle to protect our community. This series is a response to my personal feelings of withdrawal for our protection and to the barriers imposed that separated me from my second home, causing an even stronger sense of nostalgic longing, hiraeth.