Hopes & Fears

The first photographer I became engrossed in was Martin Parr. I love his approach to documentary pho-tography. There’s a humour to his work that isn’t used

often in documentary photography. He is a photojour-nalist who focuses a lot on British tourists in society. His technique is important in the outcome that he wants to portray because of the critical approach towards

his subjects; the high saturation of his photographs cer-tainly helps to do this. He is one of the reasons why I fell

in love with documentary photography. Last year I went to Florence in Italy and my passion for documen-tary photography grew even more. Being in a foreign country surrounded by a different culture and society

inspired me, trying to find the perfect image. There were two particular images that I took which I am

proud of. One of which was of two nuns walking side by side and to me that was a beautiful moment be-cause I had never seen it before. Another was an el-derly couple mirroring each other without realizing it

and that image portrayed beauty and love; they were so perfect for each other.

Music Photography is extremely unpredictable because you never know what will happen or even if it will

happen at all with some bands. However I love doing this because of the spontaneity of this type of imagery because anything can happen at all and it can be ex-

tremely raw and natural. One of my favourite photogra-phers in music photography is Roger Sargent, who is

best known for his work with the The Libertines. I love his work because of the energy he captures within the au-dience and band. It isn’t just his live band shots that are particularly striking but his portraits of both the lead sing-

ers; Carl Barat and Peter Doherty. These photographs are very beautiful and poignant images of their time to-gether. He manages to capture emotion and love be-tween the two people involved. Music photography and Documentary photography are the genres that I love working towards now. This is where my passion in

photography lies

I have also recently become intrigued with the David Attenborough

series ‘Life’ and the photography taken for the book. This possibly falls under docu-mentary photography. I recently saw an exhibition in Brighton this year and feel in love with this type of photography due to

the beauty of each image. During the next few years I would like to try this sort of imagery. However I fear it would quite dif-

ficult due to the environment the more exotic animals live and travel. It is some-

thing I am planning on looking into. In this kind of photography colour is extremely important because it makes the image that much more visually appealing. This

will be different to what I’m used to since I tend to use black and white. Doing this will help widen my creativity and not just stick to the genres that I know and feel com-fortable with and that’s what I think this

course and university is all about.

. I hope this course will develop my skills in Photoshop so I will be able to get the best possible image that I can without the image

being overdone. Over sharpening is my biggest worry because the end product can end up looking extremely unrealistic and then it

will be unusable. Especially in the area of photojournalism I will need to be more careful and wary when it comes to Photoshop,

due to implications and worry people have when it comes to docu-mentary photography. There are a lot of contradictions when it

comes to what should and what shouldn’t be manipulated on Pho-toshop. This is something that worries me because when going for a job you can never be sure if there are too much or not enough al-

tercations done on Photoshop.

Gemma Richardson