Elderly Housing, Malvern
Flats, Malvern
Detached, Malvern
Terraced, Pershore
My aim for this assignment was to show the juxtaposition of the class divide within British society through the prism of our housing usage.
Early on, when collating my initial ideas for this assignment, I decided the best way to illustrate this was by having similar images presented side by side in the form of diptychs, to highlight the disparity in the class divide. I laid down some stringent parameters to aid with continuity within the set of images. The first of which was that all of the images were to have a dead pan aesthetic, secondly, they had to be devoid of human content, also, although they didn’t have to be topographic, I wanted to ensure similarities between the images, enabling them to work as pairs. Other parameters were that the buildings had to be of the same type, and, importantly, the buildings had to be in the same town.
Once I had scouted and identified buildings to shoot – no mean feat, especially finding a working class detached house to match a regency detached – the biggest challenge was to maintain consistency of lighting. Typically, our summer yielded a variety of conditions and as shooting took place on numerous days this proved to be my biggest challenge.
Overall, I am pleased with the results. There are matches in the images in all of the sets, whether it be the environmental setting of the elderly housing; the perspective and boundary markers in the flats; the topographic style of the detached houses and the pairs of doorways for the terraces. Another thing I’m pleased with is learning some new post production skills, that of, correcting converging verticals and also how to construct diptychs in Lightroom. I have one niggling concern and that is the light in the second detached house doesn’t quite replicate the former, maybe I’m being a little picky.
There was one image that didn’t make the final edit and this was down to a number of factors. I waited in hope for nearly an hour for the sky to cloud over to reduce the shadow/highlight contrast in both images and the people in the second image just wouldn’t shift – breaking one of my self-imposed rules. I took the image knowing full well that I wouldn’t use it, but I guess I needed to see how they worked. The other reason was that all the other sets were of homes and this just seemed too out of place.
Drinking establishments, Stratford Upon Avon
Context and Narrative 