Starting a new project
A good photographer friend of mine told me once that as a photographer whenever your down or financially embarrassed you can always shoot your way out of trouble…ok bad pun but it is true. And so after several weeks of procrastination, I’ve started a new work.
The start of the year has already been quite eventfulI and in truth it’s been difficult training my thoughts on this work as since I’ve been back in the UK my time has been taken up with trying to get my show at the Focal Point Gallery together. But in all honesty now is the only time that I’ve had to stop and think about South Africa, the people I met and everything that happened. Without sounding like a wimp I have thought about my time spent in the hospital and of course people I miss…and I have felt a bit hollow of late. I guess it’s all of these factors and perhaps the antimax of building up to the show but the last week has been spent mainly sitting in front of the box watching daytime TV and feeling sorry for myself whilst doing very little.
After a few test shots - I’ve decided upon a stratergy that I feel will hopefully prove successful and I’m going to focus the project on an area of Birmingham called Aston…the home of my beloved Aston Villa - but I digress.
My idea is to examine how social exclusion affects the generation of young people that live in the area. The questions of nature / nurture and other questions of environmental behaviourism are abound but it was the recent events in Peckham and Streatham that really promted my investigation.
It is all too easy to dump the ‘underclass’ in the sink estates and forget them, deny them and then be shocked and horrified when teenagers without a future kill themselves; but herein endeth the sermon.
At the moment the idea is still of course unresolved but I feel it holds a lot of promise; well I’m starting shooting on Monday. What’s interesting is that Birmingham is twinned with Joburg in South Africa - which also has an area of the city called Newtown - perhaps it would be interesting to do a work that examined the differences and similarities between these two spaces…but let’s see what happens.
