I was mostly interested in Juliet Ferguson's "Stolen Images", which is a collection of photos from CCTV cameras, which you can hack into illegally from the internet, because they are "open." This project appealed to me, because it relates to my idea, and also because it taps into the fears of society, about access to all information, about the ethics and right to be photographed, about the way we act when a camera is pointed at us, about fears of security, and about the changing nature of photography; here photography is used as a way to monitor, without even watching anyone, just a documentation of "real life"- an opposite, and yet an exact relation to early documentary photography.
These images show a sort of continuous reality, and a continuous surveillance of society; again suggesting the invisible power of the state, but also the aimless endless recording of landscape. Further than this, and in relation to my idea, she explores the idea of what it is "to be a photographer", when we showed this to the class, they said it "wasn't photography/she isn't a photographer." I disagree with this, as does Fergeson: " I also started reflecting more on the nature of photography and on what it means to take a photograph. The majority of the cameras I used I could pan, zoom and focus. Is this any less photography than someone using a fully automatic camera and taking a picture from a designated panorama point at a beauty spot? Does photography demand a presence or are photographs taken using appropriated cameras controlled from another country in another time zone just as valid as ‘created’ images?" In my opinion, photography does not have to be someone looking through a hole in a box; photography can be more creative- such as directing others, collecting and selecting photos, deciding a project; this is about the creation, and the photos can follow. As in this project above, the Fergeson did not control the photos and what they were looking at, but she collected them and displayed them, and we now see them.
I also found another group of photographers who did a similiar project to the one I am doing; they made a project called the "beautiful Horizon", which gave street children in Rio cameras, through which they documented themselves. These are a few of the photos that were taken:
I liked this idea mostly because it gives people the power to document themselves. These photos might not be what we might take photos of as a western audience, though they might be. The people with the cameras have ultimate access to the world they are immersed, and as a viewer we get to see more, but it is from the voice of someone who never speaks. (most of the 75 children involved lived on the street, were uneducated, and extremely poor.) This is really interesting. I also liked the way the gallery was set up (below) the photographers did have a set up where they could show their favorite photos, but they also had all the negatives in boxes, so you could access them and look at them in a light box- and the experience becomes personal and interactive. When I display my photos I want to think about this approach. I really like to idea of giving a voice to a silent part of society, and I have been considering a similair way I could do things in Brighton.
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