Childhood memories...

These images are supposed to represent memories that had a big effect on me as a child. I was thinking it would be best to have these images follow a documentary style at first like Jim Goldberg's series "raised by wolves", with a child to play the character of me. I also liked the personal touches in his work, where he would as the people to write the thoughts, or feelings to aid the image. Some other people that influenced me were Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson. Lorna's work takes a more conceptual approach than Sherman's. Her work is very structured in terms of the way she creates text and the way she creates her images. Everything is stripped down when she takes her photos. A large majority of then are studio based, she keeps her backdrops plain, her models are turned away from the camera and very little of their face is shown that strips away their identity (like Waterbearer). By having the background plain it draws attention to the mystery of the character displayed which draws you in. The text gives more structure and understanding to the photo, but still leaves some mystery, so it still leaves a space for you to add your own interpretation of the image.  I then looked into Cindy Sherman and how she creates a character using herself as the model. I liked how her images seemed slightly satirical, like an over exaggeration of how we view people.

I experimented with making the image feel more personal like how Jim Goldberg allows people to write over his photos. The text seems very scrawly, because I wanted it to seem like it was written by a child.