Sunday, January 4, 2009

After Gillian Wearing


Our photography experiment was inspired by Gillian Wearing, and took place outside of a classroom, enabling us to approach a variety of people, where it was the member of the public’s story or expression that was captured. We simply the question “What were you thinking?” and presented the questioned with a blank page and marker pen. While most responses consisted largely of, “I’m cold!” or “I’m freezing!” some of the responses were thoughtful and it was these that made the approach worthwhile.

However, even the brief encounters gave us a lot of information about a person; whether they were shy or confident, how they spoke and what was important to them in life at the moment. My favourite response was that of a man who took a long time to pen the words: “Just going to call my girl to say ‘I love you’”. He, like many others, seemed to find the project really interesting – at one point all the people on the bus were staring at us while we were talking to a mother and child. I suppose while it wasn’t such a normal thing to see on the street, it was the only place to get some real responses and interact with people.

I really enjoyed this project, as it not only provoked some interesting responses in an artistic sense, but helped build confidence personally.

1 comment:

moving with you said...

this is a really gd and fun idea and a way of finding out how people think and interact with random people. i am thinkin of doin this and keeping a diary as i do it.