My second shoot, was basically all about realizing the idea I had in my head since I started thinking about this project and its topic. Hence, it was a lot more time and labour-consuming than my first shoot, because I actually had to ask people (mostly family and friends) to model for me, arrange everything and think about how and where I wanted to take my pictures.
So, just to refresh your memory, what I initially wanted to show in my pictures, was more inspired by Pickersgill's project REMOVED than by Geiger's SUR-FAKE.
I wanted to show people in different situations and also people that have different relations to each other. Thus, I thought about photographing a family, a couple, a group of friends, etc...
The one thing that should connect all of these pictures is the phone and the alienation that it creates to those closest to us, but also to ourselves.
Like in Pickersgill's project, I edited the pictures to make them black and white, because I've personally made the experience so often that colour distractes and that black and white just helps the reader to look deeper and actually focus on the actual topic of the image. (you can find a more detailed analysis about the reason for this choice in my separate blogpost about research on black and white photography)
Friendship:
So these first two shots, show a group of friends hanging around and catching up, BUT (and I know that I am repeating myself) each of them is in their own world, isolating themselves by focusing on their phones and the online world instead of living in the 'here and now' and enjoying the time with their friends. Personally I really like the first shot, because I like the angle from which it is taken, but the second shot shows more of the location and the general atmosphere, so I'm not sure which of these I might use for the photographic essay.
Love:
For the 'love part of the shoot, I decided to ask my person to model for me. Not because it makes it easier to ask your family or anything, but I thought it'd be interesting to also play around with 'age' to show that this isn't an issue that only concerns young people or as I mentioned in another post, 'generation Z', it is something that also our parents and even some grandparents are exposed to.
I personally, LOVE the first picture, it is my absolute favorite from all the shots, because I love the reflection in the window (I feel like that helps creating kind of a sad or gloomy atmosphere). Additionally, the image shows that they are physically close and yet each of them is concentrated on their phone and thus they are both lonely, although they are together.
'Me Time' :
I called this part 'Me Time' because that's what these shots are about, about what we do in our free time or when we are alone. I included very different situations. Some everyday things such as going to the bathroom or praying, and some other occupations that we do as a free time activity and as an opportunity to relax and kind of escape our daily routine. For me these moments are essential, because they also mean thinking about yourself and reflecting on your life, but in the digital age, the important 'me time' constantly transforms into a 'me and my phone' time.
The one of the muslim girl has kind of a funny background story.
It shows one of my closest friends who is a muslim and takes her religion very seriously, to the point that (no matter what she does) she interrupts it 5 times a day to pray.
So we went to do visit another friend in Germany for a day, and first thing she'd do each time after she prayed was checking her phone.
Personally, I think that the last one with the girl in the shop is really important to me personally, because each time when I go shopping on my own, I just walk through the shops with my phone always in front of me, to be honest I don't even really look at the clothes. I just keep messaging friends or checking social networks. And the weird thing is, that I actually enjoy going shopping on my own and having some time for myself. It is such a contradictory and complex phenomenon, that creeps into our daily life and habits, without us even noticing. And the sad thing is that we don't know what to do with ourselves anymore!!!
Family:
These last pictures are again all inspired by my own experience. How often have I been sitting in a restaurant, the living room or the kitchen with my parents, all of us on our phones isolating ourselves when we should actually be talking to each other and catching up after we hadn't seen in a while? HUNDREDS OF TIMES!!!And I feel like this is really sad, because family means everything to me, they are the ones that I want to share all my happy and sad moments with, but instead we just keeping distancing ourselves from each other...
So these pictures, basically show mother-daughter or father-daughter relationships, or maybe rather the alienation of these relationships due to hyperconnectivity.
I personally, don't like the one in the middle that much, because I feel like it is of pretty poor quality although it has been taken with the same camera as all the other ones (but I guess the light wasn't good either).
Random:
I didn't really know how to classify these last shots, so I just made a separate 'part' for them, although both shots are completely different.
The first one is pretty random and that was actually the point of it, just again showing the alienation to ourselves and others in an everyday situation like driving. One could also say that this kind of represents the danger of the phone in the way of 'driving and texting'.
The second image is a bit odd, I know. And I feel like it might be a bit 'too much' to use for my photographic essay. But basically what I wanted to show is an 'extreme'. Being on the phone while mowing the lawn is probably a total exaggeration, but I thought it might just be interesting to go into the extremes with the project and try things that you wouldn't normally think about in the first place.
I have to say that at first, when I saw the edited pictures and compared them to Pickersgill's images, I was kind of disappointed, because I thought that my pictures looked too simple and not special enough. But the more I look at them, the more I realize that each and every picture has its 'special' elements and although they might not be comparable to a professional's pictures, I still feel like I can be pretty satisfies, because I feel that when I make m final choices, these pictures can make a great photographic essay, because I put a lot of thought into location and representation.
So these are the pictures that I liked the most (and between which I'll probably choose for my final project) and thus edited them to get black and white images, but of course I've taken a lot of other pictures as well during this shoot and although some of them may not be that fantastic (which is also the reason why I didn't edit them) I still want to include them and give you a glimpse at everything I tried out while shooting, because I feel like an important part when developing a photography project consists of trying different things and then choosing the picture that you think look best.
(All pictures were taken with a Nikon D7200 and an 18-140mm VR lens)
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