Marie smith
Whispering for Help
Marie Smith started whispering for help originally through a different series called 'the fog has lifted slightly and i can think clearer' and that series started through a her thinking and processing her mental health. During that series she started to ask herself questions 'around the visibility of women of colour and mental health'. Due to her asking herself that question she started doing research into the mental health of women of colour. The results she found for the information provided where that women of colour did not have much engagement with mental health services and their first experience with mental health service was when they were at a point of crisis. But there were gaps regarding the experiences and it felt like for her it was hampering her understanding. So the more she researched the more she felt frustrated at the inconstancy's about the experiences of women in colour. So in order for her to develop her understanding she went out into and found her own community. Doing so changed her role from a photographer to a communicator and so se wanted to changed the way they were portrayed. So she created a proposal and took some self portraits and gained a coherent idea and thus the series whispering for help started.
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We watched this presentation where Marie Smith and Tami Aftab talked about their photography projects it shows their whole thought process through the project and the meaning and method through which they achieved it. It is a very helpful video with now I know how to develop ideas into the ideas I want.
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Then we looked at a video of 2 different artists Tami Aftab and Marie Smith explaining their method for the projects, Tami Aftab's project was about her father and his short term memory loss. Marie Smith's project was about women of colour and their feelings of themselves. They both did different topics but they had their similarities in collaboration between people and so it gives their projects a more meaningful overlook then just their projects without context. So our task was to recreate a sort of collaboration with a partner. Then we had to talk to a partner about what they are feeling and takes photos of them regarding and trying to express that felling. For my partner he was feeling paranoid and that can manifest in a multitude of ways so I tried to make as many as I could think of. As we was rushed because of time we couldn't go into to much detail about why my partner was feeling paranoid so I decided to a multitude of ways to show paranoia. The reason I why i decided to do all my photos as headshots is that to me paranoia is where your mind and thoughts can't keep together and in turn mean that their thoughts are scrambled and don't make sense which is the main reason for only showing the head the back ground of some of them show what they could be paranoid about and some could show what that paranoia is like visualised and some of some just show that it doesn't make sense.
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New Partner
I chose a new partner to try new ideas, and that partner ended up being my older sibling. I tried it slightly different to how Marie Smith does it with her first talking with the person for a time to get to know the person more and then take their photo. Instead I took the photos first for one reason being the photos are self explanatory and the other reason as I have known my older sibling my entire life.
My idea is that instead of being vague in showing the emotion of the sitter I thought of a more direct approach of the person looking at a image that positively shows what they are feeling. The reason I decided to take the photo of the sitter's back of the head was mainly to show that the sitter is facing withy and acknowledging these feelings. When I compare the photos done with the first sitter and now the new sitter I feel like I have portrayed the sitters emotions better on the new sitter than the old. It is easier to say that because I am using images to display the new sitter emotions It is a the fact that for me I don't have to spend my time looking at the photo to understand and know the sitters emotions so I can spend more time actually thinking about the sitter and why they chose these images to show their emotions.