Alfred Stieglitz was an documentary photographer who specialised in portraits and documenting cities and towns. Alfred Stieglitz focused on a range of photographic topics I particularly like his city landscape work, in which he photographs the 19th century city scape. I have chose to research Alfred Stieglitz because I like the way he can turn an ordinary city landscape into something that represents the city but is also shown in a majestic light. This is a skill is wish to incorporate into my own work. Being able to turn an seemly ordinary scene into a piece of art work by looking and photographing in the right places at the right time. what I can learn from looking at the work of Alfred Stieglitz’s work is to take my time when setting up shots. I find myself rushing the photographs I take, especially when I’m shooting on a digital camera. For my next shoot I am going to use Alfred Stieglitz as inspiration and go out to a city and shoot using film. By using film I think this will slow me down and make me think about what I’m shooting and the composition of the photograph I am about to take.

This week I am heading up to the seaside town of Leysdown on Sea to conduct a test shoot. I plan to walk around the sea side town document the local off peak sea side life leysdown has to offer. My main inspiration was from documentary photographer Martin Parr, I love his work in the British sea-side towns at peak season during the 80’s. I am aiming to juxtapose Parr’s idea by documenting sea-side towns in their off peak season. I plan to explore elements of the seaside such as the beach, amusements and the overall location. I am planning to also bring a model with me as a back up. I am bringing a model two Leysdown with me so I have a fall back if I can’t get the results from the documentation style of photography I want, as I have been warned that leysdown is quite a hard location to produce good documentary photography. This shoot is going to determine whether my project goes down the route of documentary reality or documentary fiction.

Jeff Wall is a well known photographer. His style of working is to document fictional situations by creating fictional events in time. Wall uses techniques such as actors and specialist props to create his scenes. Wall’s early work was based on mimicking seemingly everyday encounters on the street, he claimed that real life documentary photography was too challenging and time consuming, so the entirety of Wall’s photographs are especially cast even down to the clothes the models are wearing in the photographs. Later in Wall’s career he took is photography to the next level, thinking up crazy scenes and ideas for his photographs.

Wall started to create famous pieces such as, the man with the light bulbs, a sudden gust of wind and a re-creation of a war scene. Personally I think Jeff Walls work really elevated my opinion when he started to create crazy sets and scenes, he makes the audience ask more questions with his later work, why has it been arranged like that? what is the meaning behind the photograph? the reason I include Jeff Wall in my research is because I think he is good inspiration If I chose to go down the route of documenting reality. Wall as a photographer inspires me to create stores and scenes in my head and make them come to life using what I have available to me at the time.

I  especially like this piece by Jeff Wall because of the set design involved, it makes me as an audience question what is happing in the photograph and why Wall has arrange the photograph in this particular way? I love the colour palette in this photograph I think the shades of brown and yellow blend well together and help highlight the light bulbs submerging the celling. I would like to create this level of mystery and wildness in my photographs despite them being documentation reality or documentation fiction.

Martin Parr is a well known British documentary photographer who is most famous for his photographic book ‘The Last Resort’ the book features a seris of photographs of the British working class on holiday. Parr’s methord of working is to observe the things around him, Parr stated in an interview for the Royal Museum Of Greenwich “we often forget how strange everyday life is” Parr was first inspired by other documentary photographers such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. Parr’s work takes inspiration from both of these photographers because they focus on capturing real life. Martin Parr has a particular way of working, he describes the seaside as his ‘laboratory’ for his new photograph experiments. Parr aims to capture peoples reactions in a completely natural way, he does this by sneaking up to his subjects and getting as close to them as he can without them knowing, and then photograph them as subtly as possible.

By not making the subject aware that their photograph is being taken has its advantages, by using this technique Parr gets a completely natural reaction from people being exposed by the camera. When photographing a subject in a obvious way they often act differently in front of the camera giving a false documentation of a moment. Parr has spent his career documenting the working class British public on their seaside holidays. The beach is such a good location to photograph the public because the beach brings a diverse number of people. The seaside is a place where people let themselves escape from everyday life, people at the beach are often more chilled out and more comfitable with their bodies, this makes the beach the perfect location for documenting the British public at their best and worst.

For this project on image making my research on Martin Parr has inspired me to visit my local beach, somewhere I have a strong emotional childhood connection to and go back and photograph the location through an adults point of view. I plan to perhaps focus on a particular area of this location and photograph the people I encounter whilst observing. As a child I remember always loving the arcades so this is a particularly good spot for me to photograph, the arcades are a good place to photograph because the public are too engrossed in the slot machines to pay attention to the camera. In the fashion of Martin Parr I am going to attempt to photograph people without them knowing because I believe this gives a better result for documentary photography.