I began this project with little to no idea of what I wanted to create or what I wanted for a final outcome, I had no inspiration and after spending the summer holiday lacking in ideas I began to panic. This panic wasn’t helped by the fact that assignments have deadlines and if I didn’t meet those deadlines there’s a high chance I would fail. I have yet to do my final presentation which is on November the 23rd but here I shall share with you my journey so far…
So where to begin?
I started with my usual brain-storming and mind-mapping, jotting down any ideas that pop into my mind to hopefully come to a sane idea that I can run with and expand over the eight weeks of our project.
Fruit. This was my conclusion. I wanted to explore the different aspects of fruit and how photographing it in different ways can evoke different reactions and feelings – whilst linking this into the project title of ‘In Sickness and in Health’. And so the madness begins…
Now I mentioned the word ‘sane’ – this project has been anything but, in fact I even acquired some interesting nicknames such as ‘Hannibal Lecter’ during the course of the assignment.
My initial ideas revolved around the idea of fruit being a vital yet mundane part of life, something no one really takes much notice of but we all know its important to health and survival. I wanted to photograph the fruit in such a way that would make you take a second glance. I aimed to take very clinical photos of the fruit in ‘health’ form and then in ‘sickness’ form. Here’s a couple of images from that shoot;
As you can tell the lemon in the left hand image was freshly cut. For the right hand image I left the lemon for a week before shooting it – to the disgust of some of my classmates!
I feel I achieved what I wanted with these images but they weren’t quite as striking as I had hoped them to be. The fruit represented the decay and decomposition of the mind in such illnesses as dementia and Alzheimer’s. Although the studio setup managed to allow me to get the detail of the lemon I felt this could work better in a more natural setting, somewhere you would normally see fruit rather than in the bright lights of the studio.
So I moved my fruit to my kitchen – its typical home. Here’s an image from that shoot;
I did these shoots with different types of fruit and some decayed better than others, the lemon stood out a lot more on the wooden surface making the mould more visible.
For my next shoots I plan to explore the idea of ‘still-life’ and how altering the subject matter can change the viewers perception of the image. Still-life images of fruit tend to be rather mundane so I plan to create images that can purvey a deeper and more meaningful message to the viewer – hopefully on a more personal level.
This is where I shall leave you for this post but don’t fret, the gory stuff is coming soon!
– A.T
Amy Thurgood Photography 