Evaluation

The Theme for this A2 project was 'Personal Project'. For this project I had to link it to my previous project by using and exploring my pathway of documentary. For my previous project, I explored documentary by documenting housing problems in croydon. For this project I wanted to continue with documenting my hometown of croydon and by looking at crime and documenting the negativity croydon is known for. For my outcome I created two digital collages inspired by Miles Donovan and Kurt Schwitters including film and digital photography I had taken in the style of WeeGee and Ed Thompson. 

When creating my Final outcome I used photoshop to be able to use different effects and paint brushes to distress and manipulate my photographs and to form them all together to create a Miles Donovan inspired digital collage. I used a mixture of digital and film photography. When developing my film photography I used techniques such as vignetting and dodging and burning. For my research I looked at artists such as Miles Donavan, Kurt Schwitters, WeeGee, Richard Vantielcke, Tuen Voeten and Ed Thompson. For my outcome I created two inspired collages looking at two similar themes. I created one looking more at criminal activity such as stabbings, murder, gangs, burglary etc. I also created another one looking more at hidden crime/ depression giving a quite paranormal, mysterious feel to it. I used text in the collages to show these themes and the areas I was documenting but used jumbled up typewriter style typography because I wanted to still keep the themes slightly hidden and to make people feel what they think about the themes being shown. 

I feel that my outcome was a success and I really love that in the end I decided to add colour to the white areas in the collage to make it much more unique. I added colour because I felt that my collage was very negative and upsetting because of all the negativity I was documenting about croydon and I wanted to show how I see croydon. I have been living in and around croydon my whole life and even though at the moment a lot of criminal activity is happening, it isn't as bad as the press portray it. Croydon is still a happy positive location and has many positive areas and people who live there. I chose yellow, orange and blues because I felt that these were the best colours when experimenting and they show positivity and happiness. Yellow and orange are bright happy colours which I used for my crime themed collage and blues are known to be calming so I used these for my depression themed collage.

I feel that throughout this project I have improved and learnt many new skills. My digital skills have vastly improved from experimenting a lot in photoshop and looking at many artists work. I feel that I have also learnt new skills in the darkroom and digital in making photographs look much more distressed and almost like paranormal found footage. I feel that I have also improved my photography skills to make my photographs look much more realistic showing action and emotion instead of set-up and much more plain and simple photography.

 I feel that if I had more time I could've taken more photographs of more people and looked at more crime news stories instead of taking photographs of only two people. However I feel that taking photographs of only two people worked well because it almost shows a story throughout because of how I have used my sister as the victim and my friend as the criminal because of how it looks like he is terrorising her and he is the killer. I did complete all that I wanted to do but feel that I could've experimented with more film experiments because I really like the film photography I scanned in to use for my collage. Overall I am very pleased with my final piece because I feel I have successfully documented croydon as I wanted to and I really like how I have progressed from previous project and explored my pathway of documentary.