Script

I am about to start editing the script for the movie I have been designing to show the way people act around cameras. Here is the script: 

Script for movie:

Starts with making of the camera bag and sign etc- close up, not sure what’s happening. Cycle down to place and hang it up. Blows in the wind.

VO: In the society we live in, there is an obsession around images. This obsession is related to the capturing of images, and the capturing of images of ourselves. Where ever you go, you are always surrounded by cameras, by people taking photos, by people posing, by people capturing images.

At this point there are shots of tourists posing and smiling at the camera, and shots of people taking photos of each other.

What interests me is how people behave around cameras. The second when they begin to pose. Barthes explains it as:  "When I feel myself observed by a lens, everything changes; I constitute myself in the process of posing. I instantaneously make another body for myself. I transform myself in advance into an image."

Shots of people posing.

I am planning to hang 50 disposable cameras up around several cities in England, with a sign asking people to take photos of themselves. In the act of taking a photo of themselves, and the photo people take, I can see how people act when asked to photograph themselves and their behaviour relating to cameras.

Here are a few examples of people taking a photo of themselves with the cameras I provided

.

The thought process seems to be:

What is that?

Why this there a camera hanging up?

Who is this for?

What do they want me to take a photo of?

What SHALL I take a photo of?

If I take a photo of myself, how does the photographer expect me to pose?

How do I normally pose in photographs?

What does this situation (in public) mean for how I pose in this photograph?

What have others done?

Is anyone watching? (photographer included)

I am being asked to take a photo, does it matter that I don't know for?

Is this creepy?

I am being asked to take a photo; does this mean I have to be arty?

I want to be in the photo, what is the best way to do this?

Ask someone or selfie?

How do I want myself to be represented? Selfie is too down with kids but I am bit embarrassed to ask someone else…

How does the photographer expect me to be represented?

Do i have everything I want in the frame?

Is the film Ok?

This part has a double of filming picking up camera and looking through lens and other people interacting with the camera, and then leaving.

This thought process which I imagine happens when people take the photos shows a huge awareness and inter-textuality of how to construct a photo and how to represent oneself in a photo. Here is how a few of the photos turned out…

Show photos from before and also videosàbecome photos from Oxford

But what do these photos mean further than that we all know how to use cameras nowadays?

Well, if I run a couple of the photos together, you can see a few similarities in the way the people in the photos decided to set the picture up, and how to behave in the picture. All these people are posing, and they are consciously setting up a public image of themselves to show to the photo project. Look at this one, for example, they all lean close together and smile, arms around each other- they are close and happy, constructing a representation for the public which shows them as positive and rounded. People pose in the photos similarly, also, suggesting that the way they pose is pre-determined by other texts they have come into contact with. Culture has told them how to pose, and they adhere to this idea.

Here is an example of how people approach the cameras:

Film of someone approaching camera and taking photo- quick.

There is little thought in the way people approach the camera. People want to interact; they want to be part of the project without even knowing what it is, or where the photos are going. This seems to link to various anxieties around photographs and people.

This firstly shows a need to interact in a reality, an anxiety about being able to construct the reality yourself. With all the photos people take of each other, all of the surveillance cameras and constant documentation, people are not in control of their own image anymore. People are anxious to control their image. When they pick up the camera I have left, they do not just want to interact with the project, they also want to be able to control their image and give out an image of themselves which is constructed and perfect.

This might seem to show that people are anxious about what the rest of the world thinks when seeing the photo? I feel that because people don’t know where the images are going, this isn’t the fear. People aren’t scared that, as Sontang suggests, their image will give someone else possession of them, no… The anxiety seems to be that if they aren’t photographed, they won’t be able to prove it happened. Again, because of all the images which are being taken all the time, and they way that now we can take hundreds of photos, photography has become more than a photo; photography is a way of experiencing and remembering the past. This film shows people taking hundreds of photos; if they do not, can they prove it happened?

In taking a photo with the camera I provide, people are able to tell everyone they existed there, in that moment, that they took part.

And feelings after that towards the final image? Well, it’s disposable.

Camera being collected. Me collecting photos from boots. Film family looking at photos/me looking at photos with someone else. Talking about how weird and personal and voyeuristic it feels.

End. 

I also did a few more cameras hanging up, here is a photo: