At the start of the Identity unit, I first planned ideas based around a range of themes such as nationality, culture, age and social class, which was the general themes which I wanted to follow in the unit. I first began researching infamous 60’s photographers such as David Bailey and Terence Donovan who captured the swinging sixties culture within their studio work. David Bailey’s style of portraiture was a key inspiration to me during the project as from the start I wanted to capture similar results as some of his most iconic photographs, such as the portraits of Mick Jagger or Jean Shrimpton. Alongside researching Bailey, I began to experiment within studio lighting and how I could use backdrops in a similar 1960’s style. Shooting in the studio gave me a basic understanding of equipment and lighting positioning (e.g. butterfly, Rembrandt etc) which even though I didn’t use at the end of the project, I would like to revisit in the future to get a better understanding. I began to take inspiration from Donovan’s portraits which were shot in urban environments but still captured the slick aesthetic as seen in Baileys portraits, which led me to shoot my second set of images focusing on a subject dressed in vintage 60s style clothing with a union jack as a backdrop (inspired by early photographs of The Who). The shoot led me to develop on the idea of identity through nationality and also how to capture British-ness in a portrait without any explicit giveaways. With the idea of British nationality, I researched Gavin Watson who created candid snapshot portraits of his skinhead friends during the 1970s and Platon a British photographer who created a series based on his family’s Greek heritage. Watson’s work gave me the template to which I wanted to create my work in a relaxed, unprofessional manner but still deliver a story effectively. I shot more images in this style within a friend’s bedroom without any artificial setup to the scene but after comparing the images to the shots before I decided to go back to my original style and create more tradition/clean portraits. Following with the theme of Britishness/60s I looked into Robert Clayton, John Bulmer and Vanley Burke who focused their work on a specific area and time within England during the 60s, 70s and 90’s. Planning my final set of images for hand-in, I decided to follow the same likeness as test shoot three but also focus more on the location which the model was in. I used David again as a model as his natural ‘look’ fitted the project well, as well as most of his clothes being vintage/retro. I chose to shoot a roll of HP5 400 (pushed to 800 for more contrast / being able to shoot it comfortably indoors) with David in a traditional pie & mash shop as the interior was classic and the essence of a pie and mash shop is completely British. As for the final four prints, I decided to work parallel with the vintage aesthetic and print the images in the darkroom which I was incredibly pleased with the outcome as I wasn’t pleased with the scans which I previously got from the negatives (I found the scans to be have too much grain and blown out highlights within David’s shirt while in the darkroom prints I was able to split grade the print to achieve more dynamic range, as well as getting better grain structure than the scans). At the start of the Identity project I found it incredibly difficult to come up with a theme/idea which actually interested me enough to create work over. I think the idea of identity is so broad that I didn’t want to create work which seemed meaningless or overdone. This is probably the main issue I faced during the project, but I soon overcame it by purely researching photographers which I have taken inspiration from before and creating images purely on what I wanted to do on the day. Towards the end of the project was when I started to enjoy the work I was creating as I liked experimenting with the notion of being and also the visible differences between culture within the 60s/70s and now.
Joe Haines 