I have been struggling to find a way to move forward with this assignment which I know is due to the lack of clarity about what I am trying to achieve and, more specifically, what text to use. I have an idea of how I would like to present the final images, prints with handwritten text, my thinking about this having been influenced by the looking at the work of Duane Michals, Jim Goldberg and somewhat tangentially, Elsa Dorfman. However, the words remain something of a struggle.

My first idea is to find a poem that is about identity and then try and produce a series of images based on that. Whilst this is still something that I might look at, as I know very little poetry and the few poems that I do know, such as Atlas by U. A Fanthorpe, are very graphic in their descriptions I am concerned that I could end up with a very literal interpretation of the poem. I think if I go down this route I will need to do a lot of research into which poem to use. For example, when searching online for poems about identity one of the poems at the top of the search results is Song of Myself by Walt Whitman. A bit more searching reveals that it is considered Whitman’s most important work, but also that it is in divided into 52 sections and is 1,300 lines long! A slight variation of this approach was to look at song lyrics but this is something I have discounted as I think that song lyrics do not work as well as stand alone text as poetry does.

Another idea is to create a series of portraits together with handwritten text from the subjects which examine their childhood aspirations and compare it with their adult selves. The idea would be to get each sitter to complete a sentence that started with; ‘When I was a child I wanted to be…’ and for them to write down what they wanted to be when they were children and then for them to sign the image with their name, occupation and age. From a photographic perspective I thought of experimenting with either a straight-forward head and shoulder or half-length portrait or taking the same shot by with myself placed slightly above the subject to signify their childhood aspriations juxtaposed with them as adults. I think this approach would fall under the identity part of the course, but at the moment I think it is challenging to achieve because of social distancing.

My final idea is to create a series that is a commentary on the issues facing Britain at the moment; coronavirus, racial injustice and the the continuing impact of the decision to leave the European Union and through these pose questions about our national identity. The aim for the text would be to use newspaper headlines and combine these with bucolic landscape images, the idea being that the text functions as relay and that because the text is just a headline it functions as an open narrative. The idea would be that the text and images would be jarring and would encourage the viewer to question which gives a more accurate picture of the country. In addition the stark difference between the image and text would also serve as a metaphor for a nation that is deeply divided, whose divisions show little sign of healing and to raise questions about why the country is not at ease with itself. The idea for this approach was partly inspired by the Duane Michals image shown below.