A breakdown of my documentary photography projects, all shot on medium format film using my Mamiya RZ67 and Portra 400.
'Documentary Photography Projects on Medium Format Film'
‘Along the Curb’
This photography project was a collection of stranger portraits, focussing on the male persona on the street, which provided many interesting characters. I wanted to create a database of the men I observed on the street and tried to create a diverse body of work featuring subjects from different nationalities, age groups, and job professions. In the end, I decided to present these photos as a collection of prints which was a totally new way of seeing my work which I hadn’t done a whole lot previously.
When taking photos of strangers, you want to be as friendly as possible, and really avoid harassing people for a photo. As soon as someone thinks you might be taking advantage of them, you’ve lost a portrait and the trust of someone, so it’s crucial you present yourself in the most honest and least-threatening way. It’s also useful to outline what the image might be used for, just in case they feel their privacy may be breached, so always have a little script in the back of your mind.
So I made this photography project on my Mamiya RZ67, which is a medium format SLR camera which was a great choice for shooting clean high-quality portraits. I also used Portra 400 for the whole photography project. I actually bought the Mamiya RZ67 for the reason of making this photography project and I am very glad that I made that choice. The Mamiya RZ67 also has a waist-level finder, which works really well when making portraits of strangers as you can’t hide behind the camera creating another layer of trust between you and your subject.
I looked at Alec Soth’s work, who I will discuss more in the next photography project. But just briefly, he often documents disconnected communities in a collaborative way, so although it’s a fairly different subject matter, I was inspired by his ability to capture portraits of people who he shared no prior connection with, but was still able to communicate a particular narrative about them
‘Operation Footscray’
So learning from my past mistakes and a full year later, I thought I would build upon my previous work and attempt to create a more complete photography project this time around.
So this series also shot on the Mamiya RZ67 and Portra 400, documents the people and places of Footscray, a very multi-cultural area of Melbourne. It’s also an area that has experienced a fair share of gentrification, impacting housing prices which has shifted the culture that’s existed there for many years. So I thought it was important I touched on this idea of ‘the old vs the new’.
As far as inspirations go, I looked at the work of Alec Soth, but more specifically his book ‘Sleeping by the Mississippi’. This photography project explored the people and places along the Mississippi river back in the early 2000’s. All shot on a 8x10 large format camera, Soth combined portraits and landscapes creating a harmonious relationship between the two. I was intrigued by this idea of picking a geographical location and documenting whatever exists with those parameters within a particular discourse.
I also looked into the work of Ingvar Kenner, focussing on his book titled ‘Citizen’. This project documents the people he came across either by chance, or through a job over the span of 10 years. What I find so interesting with this collection of photos, is some of his subjects are famous people, and some are not, but they all exist on the same level, with the only difference being their gender. Each portrait has a similar composition, but he uses space extremely well to enhance his narrative, keeping each image very unique.
‘From Hell to Heaven’
I decided to experiment with photoshop and collage and began messing around my old photos and trying to find a use for them and give them a new purpose. So after a few weeks of playing around with this idea it led me onto this project, which attempted to challenge the notion of documentary photography in a 21st-century post-truth world. The images are also sequenced in a way where they start in the dark tones representing hell and transition into the lighter tones representing heaven.
I looked into the work of Lucas Blalock, who mainly focuses on more abstract photography. He uses a photo which he has taken on and then cuts pieces out in photoshop creating these obscure images only slightly different from the original. I would say this sort of style is very true to 21st century photography and I imagine it will become more popular in the future. What drew me in, was just how creative his pieces are, and how he came to make some of these.
Alec Soth: alecsoth.com/p...
Ingvar Kenne: ingvarkenne.com/
Lucas Blalock: art21.org/arti...
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