Abandonment
My project's concept is to look at the repercussions of our way of living; not per say an entirely environmental repercussion, nor looking at simple cause and effect, but more our attitudes and way of life towards all things.
Our throw away attitude to all of our creations, without second thought, adopting an out of sight, out of mind attitude to extremities.
The word I attach to this, is 'abandonment', as we create and discard, and we hide what we discard.
My first main inspiration was Pieter Hugo's series 'Permanent Error', where he looked at the E-waste dumps in Ghana, taking mainly portraits of the people scavenging in this area but also of the E-waste itself.
As I thought of what would stand out, as the most noticeable trace of the humans that were, in this post-apocalyptic landscape, I thought of buildings, as they are our 'habitats' or our 'nests' that we construct to live and function within, and their abandonment would be the clearest sign of the life that was, and that life that past, the waste of our lives, and the waste of our way of living.
After I had found my abandoned building, I at first looked at what the building once was, but then I stripped it of it's obvious identity, as it had been abandoned it was now meaningless and purposeless, I looked towards the works of Eugene Richards' series in North Dakota, and decided to adopt his visual style. I broke down the building into pieces, and looked at the pieces where people would have used, the bar where they drank, the doorway they entered through, the office they worked in.
I came to this place around half a dozen times, the first few with my DSLR to simply get a feel for the place, and trial it as my subject. Once I was certain, I came back with a Mamiya RZ67 to begin shooting, however my photographic choices turned out to be more aesthetic ones for what I myself was intrigued about, and not for my subjects' intent or meaning. I rebooked a Mamiya RZ67 to return to shooting, unfortunately I had the bad luck of a faulty lens, and the shutter was locked open, wasting my film, when I returned to stores I was forced to switch to a Fuji 6X9 as a back up, which is not designed for exposure times as long as mine where (ranging between 30 - 60 seconds), this caused some flooding when I wound my film between shots as the shutter did not close in time. I also found some colour balancing issues when it came to the darkroom, as I was shooting on fuji 160 colour film, which again was not designed for exposure times as long as mine, resulting in some inconsistencies when the film was processed. If given the time, I would reshoot these on the Mamiya RZ67, which I originally intended to shoot on, and switch my film to Portra 400 as it is better suited to longer exposures.
