Decision time for my photography direction.

I have spent some time thinking about my direction over the last few months. I had a few of my students work with me allowing me to make portraits of them, for me over the summer. Thinking that I could use the resulting images for my website and let them lead me in a new direction. While I like the resulting images and am using them, the idea behind them was missing. My idea was that as the sitters that I asked were create arty types working in East London I would be able to make new work that would let me work towards a new editorial market.

 

To do this, I was thinking about what I tell my students that you need to photograph your interests and from those interests you will find a market and a series of magazines that can be used to promote and build a new portfolio from. While within those magazines will be a group of advertisers that you could also promote your work to, thereby enabling a photographer to develop a viable business strategy.

However, I did not count on one simple fact that the subject did not really inspire me as I needed to be interested in artists working or living in the East End of London which I so obviously am not otherwise I would know the scene and who the movers and shakers are within it. Which I so do not, os obviously my plan had a fatal flaw into for the start. So I went back to thinking and thinking, which still did not work so the reason I am writing this is that I had a brain wave a few nights ago. One of the things I do is write stream of conscious thoughts out on to paper, this helps me to clear the rubbish from my head and let me get to sleep when or if my mind is running in overdrive.

The result of these ruminations was that I have now decided on a new direction, within my portraiture.

The idea moving forward for my work will be to find people who are actively interesting in working towards positive social change. In other words the local/national community organiser/volunteer, the protester, the academic who is writing/talking about social issues, etc, the list could go and I will expand on this someday. This will then fit nicely within my interests of documentary photography, while still being on a separate site it will bring my photography more inline with my interests. This for me, is an important step forward and will lead to me making the images that are focused on the subject not on the photography. This is something else I could expand on, as I think a photographers style in part comes from how they aesthetically address their interests photographically.

So now I have to find people to photograph to make this work and it will ultimately render the work you see here on the website become my archive and not representative of who I am as a photographer. Now that is a cool thought, to have something as fundamental as that work out is rather liberating. Lets see were it can take us and who it can lead us to meet. So what I will be doing over on my portrait photography website www.mwplant.com will more closely fit within my idea of what my photographic vision is of how I see the world.