For this assignment I have free rein to produce a series of no more than fifteen images that relates to any of the material discussed in the course and must represent a notion of identity and place that I am personally inspired by.

I remember trying to come up with an idea for the final assignment in Context and Narrative and struggling to do so. Whereas with the previous assignments I have found interpreting the brief relatively straight-forward, open briefs like this one I find more challenging. At the moment I have three ideas which I am considering, each based on one of the concepts examined in the course.

Possibly my favourite idea, and I think definitely the most challenging, is to create a series of images of residents of my postcode. This is based on the June Street images photographed by Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows. The houses in my postcode are mid-sized Victorian terraces of slightly differing designs and my idea is to fairly closely reproduce the approach of Meadows and Parr to show people in their surrounds using background as context. The difficulty with this concept is finding enough people who would be willing to let me come and photograph them in their front room which I think would be difficult in ordinary circumstances and exceptionally difficult in view of the need to limit contact with strangers due to coronavirus.

My second idea is almost a rework of the square mile assignment in Expressing Your Vision. The idea would be to look in detail and photograph the bridges and the river Cam where I go running several times a week. This would be my take on Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi but on a much reduced scale, a stretch of around 3.5 kilometres instead of 2,500 miles! I think the problem with this idea is that it would end up looking too similar to the images I produced for assignment four as some of the photographs were taken along the same stretch of river.

My final idea is to go back to portraiture and to try and combine the ideas of background as context with image and text. The idea would be to photograph members of my wider family, at a safe distance, in a location that they choose and to combine that with their answer to the interview question, describe yourself in five words. At this stage I’m not sure if I’m trying too hard to combine the ideas and I’m not sure if I should know the five words before I photograph them or not. What I like about this idea is plays with notions of identity, self-identity and family and it would also, if everyone is happy to be photographed, cover a wide age range which might give it another dimension.

For now I am going to spend a bit more time mulling over the ideas before I start planning who or what to photograph.