C, B.

My final project of the first year at university was quite a personal project. I photographed Cambridge, my hometown, and Wales, where my mother’s side of the family are from, as well as my family and places and objects that were personal to me. It was my first time of trying a documentary style approach to a project, and it has fast become one of my favourite genres.

These photographs were taken on Kodak Portra 400 35mm film, hence the vibrant colours and clarity. I highly recommend this film if you are into colour! William Eggleston was my main inspiration, the ‘father’ of colour photography. I find colour so important in a photograph – it is the way we see the world, the way we can document it, as I have done in this project.

The title ‘C, B.’ is the beginning of the Cambridge post code, as well as being a play on words, “See, be.” (I know, too witty for my own good…) This is the way I see the world, and how I feel I’m a part of it.

As John Szarkowski (former director of photography at MOMA, New York) said about William Eggleston’s photography:

To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer’s home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word…they seem concerned simply with describing life.

I looked at Paul Graham’s essay, ‘Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult’, which I will do another blog post on as I could write a whole other essay on that guy’s work. But his writings made me realise that I was over-thinking my work – trying to find a coherent theme in all of the photographs I was taking, trying to make some kind of sense of them. And then I finally caught onto this thought and ran after it…the realisation that this IS my sense – capturing these moments, my moments, my sentimental thoughts as I walk around in my shoes, the shoes I briefly let the viewer into. Not for a mile, but for a moment or two as they try to make their own sense of my photographs.

…because it’s all my life, surely it will make sense? Perhaps. Sometimes that works, sometimes it’s indulgent, but really it’s your choice, because you are also free to not make ‘sense’.

– Paul Graham

Please let me know what you think and if you have any recommendations on photographers/artists to look at!