A Day in the life session with the Mayall’s
Every family has a story & that story is made up of so much more than just the big things like weddings and births. Their stories are made up of all the hundreds & thousands of little every day things. The beautiful bright moments, the grit & the ugly. The unnoticed.
My intentions for the blog is to record a series of work that demonstrates my explorations of the idea of Documentary Photography. It’s a university project which I’m pursuing about, Family Documentary Photography.
I have decided to choose my family as the subject of this project. I intend to portray my family in there everyday routine. It will be shot at my sisters House as I’m basing the project around them more because they have children which could be a great way to portray documentary. They’re an ordinary family, 3 of them, My sister ‘Sarah’, Husband ‘Yamin’ and daughter ‘Jasmin’. In the photos as well will be my other sister ‘Annie’ and her son ‘Jensen’. She will be also in the photos as she spends a lot of time at my sister ‘Sarah’s’ house and spends most of her day with the family.
The series will be no more than 10 images and no less than 6. As I find to tell an actual story about a family and to be able to document them through there whole day into a photograph, the best way is to capture a few images than just a tableau. So you get the full story you’re trying to portray.
I want to focus more on kids than adults as I find that they give more of a unique interesting narrative to tell within a documentary photo. Kids have a lot of thoughts and interesting things to photograph. Kids are very lively and always on there feet keeping busy which therefore I can take a variety of different shots.
Documentary
Documentary photography is an application to tell a story in a series of pictures. This is quite similar to photojournalism, but the benefit of documentary style portfolios is that the story can be told over a number of different images, giving it a natural sense of progression rather than just having one image to represent the continuing stories. The are most commonly seen in newspapers or magazines, as well as blogs on the internet.
Documentary photography is very often candid and centres around people more than locations or objects. My pictures will be photographed in their daily live, which the models won’t have knowledge that they have been photographed. This means that the models will not be posed in any way, nor will any controlled lighting be used. The person in the shots can appear to be aware that they are being photographed but they have not set up extravagant poses, being captured in their daily life or routine. Most documentary photographs I’ve seen are in black and white, as the lack of colour can strongly emphasise the emotion being portrayed in the images.