RIZWANA
ALI
MAJOR PROJECT
PHOTOGRAPHS OF LOTS OF PEOPLE IN ONE SMALL HOUSE TO PORTRAY HOW POOR CONDITIONS ARE AS MANY PEOPLE LIVE IN A 2 BEDROOM HOUSE FOR EXAMPLE.
THE ISSUES:
HOMELESSNESS
HOUSING ISSUES IN LONDON
INCREASING AFFORDABILITY
PRIVATE RENTED SECTOR
RISK OF EVICTION
WHAT TO CAPTURE:
ABANDONED HOUSES
ABSTRACT PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE INSIDE OF HOUSES SHOWING THE BAD CONDITIONS.
I have chosen this idea as I feel that the housing in London is quite poor and the conditions aren’t as great as it should be as London seems to be such an advanced place with lots of great things to visit so why aren’t there better conditions for those that live in London. It seems as if standards of houses really go according to the social class which are working, middle and upper classes which shouldn’t be the case as everyone should be able to live in the conditions they deserve as we have the right as humans to get equal treatment from the start.
POOR CONDITIONED HOUSES
E.G. BROKEN WINDOW, MOULD NEAR WINDOWS, RIPPED UP WALLPAPER, CRACKS ON WALLS, BAD FURNITURE AND SO ON.
In order to find a topic to focus on I researched on the issues that are found in London and one main one is housing. I researched on housing further using "https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/issues/housing/", which spoke about the issues, data on housing and what they are doing to reduce this problem.
During the project I will be researching about the different locations I can visit for this issue and I will also research on the effect it can have on people and what the housing issues can lead to.
What I am trying to capture is how bad conditions really are in London and how there isn’t enough acknowledgment of the issue especially with people that are happy with their living condition and they aren’t considering how people are struggling around the world and due to this housing issue there are lots of homeless people not being thought about carefully.
According to Homeless Link, the number of people that are homeless in England has risen by 169% in the year 2017 since 2010.
"https://www.homeless.org.uk/facts/homelessness-in-numbers/rough-sleeping/rough-sleeping-explore-data"
INSPIRATION:
Joakim Eskildsen is a Danish photographer based in Berlin and he has a series of photographs, which capture poverty in America. This has inspired me to take photographs of the poor housing conditions in London as after seeing the photographs in America it shows exactly how bad conditions are but they aren’t expressed and spoken about as much so by capturing it, it allows people to see and face the facts of the issue that is in front of our very eyes.
What interest me about these images is that it shows exactly how a place is overcrowded and how people have to make the most of where they are living and store everything as best as they can by using every little space because they cant afford and are unable to be in a house that is suitable for them.
TECHNICAL SKILLS:
My technical skills will be pushed as I will be trying out skills that I haven’t done before such as using shutter speed as a key skill by either slowing it down or having a fast shutter speed to get different outcomes. For example, I would like to take pictures of people walking around in a house using a slow shutter speed so that a blurred effect is created showing each person slightly walking around and I would also like to do that with a fast shutter speed to capture each person exactly and have a completely different outcome just by changing shutter speeds.
Another way my technical skills will be pushed is because when editing I will try out different tools in order to make the pictures look more dramatic and I will try to make the poor conditions stand out.
CREATIVE SKILLS:
It’s a type of photography that I haven’t done yet and I will be focusing on architecture mainly which I haven’t done yet. As I will be focusing mainly on the interior of a house I will push my skills on having a keen eye for detail and be able to make conditions look artistic within my photography but be able to show the seriousness of it.
I will also be able to explore well as I will have lots of different locations to visit in London and I will be able to be creative by finding a variety of different places and not just sticking to one place.
RESEARCH:
As I live in Newham I decided to take pictures of the housing issues within the area and other boroughs that are out of Newham but still close by as it shows how situations are within the place that I live in. The research I did was mainly based on Newham as most of my images will be based on this borough.
I found that the boroughs in London were ranked from the worst to best and it was from the 29th worst borough. According to metro.co.uk, Newham was listed as the 18th best borough which is extremely poor since it is ranked from the 29th. Tower Hamlets is the 7th and Camden is the 4th best. The reason I checked for these specific boroughs is because the photographs I will be taking is based in the London Borough of Newham, Camden and Mile End which is part of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
As I wanted to show the poor conditions in London that are related to housing I did research on the issue itself to show exactly how bad the situation is. From my research I can understand that London needs to ensure there are 66,00o homes built a year but they won’t be able to do this without the government helping. Most of the new homes that are being built are extremely overprice and not in the price range for the people that are originally from London which makes it harder for them to move out of houses with big families and little space. According to The Guardian, the top priority is to fix the housing crisis in London however this is difficult for just Sadiq Khan and the councils to do and the government need to step in to improve the situation.
PLAN:
My plan for this shoot is to show the housing crisis in London overall. To do this I’ll be taking a series of pictures inside houses which will show how poor the conditions are and how the council don’t exactly help the best they can to sort out problems for families. The next series of images will be of abandoned houses as it shows exactly how many empty buildings there are but no use is being made out of it. The last set of images will be of construction. I will specifically be taking images of road works.
For the houses indoors I will go to at least 3 different houses so there is a variety of things to show. Some will show the lack of space for a lot of people staying in a small house, others will show broken parts and mould in the house which cant be sorted out easily due to how expensive it could be to repair the damages.
For the abandoned buildings I will be going to Camden, Mile End, Forest Gate, Stratford, Plaistow, and Beckton. This is so that there are many different types of abandoned buildings and each one would have been abandoned for different times.
The construction will mainly be shown in Stratford and Forest Gate as there is a lot of roadwork going on there at the moment and it is lasting a very long time and is quite unnecessary.
When editing all the images I will make it black and white. This would add more meaning to it that way and will make it more dramatic whereas if colour is shown it doesn’t show the purpose of the images and just makes everything look good and interesting instead of portraying concern.
PHOTOSHOOT:
These first couple of photographs that I’m showing are the ones that didn’t work well or I just experimented with when editing the images. For this particular image I realised after taking the image that it didn’t work well because I wanted to capture the roadwork happening and wanted to show how they could be doing something more useful like build houses. But in this mage you are able to see that there is building taking place at the back which contrasts with what I want to portray.
I felt as though this image didn’t really work well either because you’re unable to tell what is really going and the gates take over most of the image which takes away the focus of the real subject.
It also shows a lot going on in a little space and doesn’t allow the viewers to understand what they are meant to be focusing on as nothing is really the main subject.
With this I wanted to show the difference between an old and new building, which is why the newly designed building is at the background. When editing I wanted to only make the abandoned building black and white to highlight the fact that it is the main subject and to add more meaning to the building, showing how old it is and how it could be redesigned to create something better and useful.
The images above only show the ones that weren’t too great and some experimenting I did and the following images will now all be a series. It starts off with issues within a house then abandoned buildings and the last series is construction. The purpose of this series is to show the housing issues in London and what could be the solution to end this.
The first series of issues within a house starts off with siblings who have to share a small room and struggle due to the lack of houses and care in London. It then goes onto images of broken parts and mouldy walls of a house, which could be immediately cared for but is not because of minimal treatment being served by councils and other important people who could make a change to help people live in better conditions.
Within the first series, the purpose of the first image was to show how packed everything was within one room and the reason for having all the siblings in the image was to highlight the fact that they all have to share one bedroom between themselves. By adding people into the image, it adds more meaning to the image and shows that there is a story behind it whereas if it was just the room people may not understand what this is meant to be about.
The purpose behind the rest of the images in the first series is to show more abstract photographs. This is so that everything is seen in more depth and it is more difficult to understand what is exactly going on, but it helps as it only focuses on the problems with the house. In each image if I was to show the entire place and not only zoom into the problem there may not have been much wrong, and no one would get the problem but by doing this it highlights and exaggerates the problems within a household.
With each of the images in the second series my main purpose was to capture how abandoned places look and intensify that when editing it black and white. I experimented more with this series with my camera skills as I tried to used depth of field, I thought about the framing much more when thinking about what should and shouldn't be included. In one of the images I captured the abandoned building and behind it is showing a new building and the purpose of this was to show the contrast between the two.
This last series is showing the constructions taking place in London. The reason behind capturing this was to show that there are a lot of roadwork’s taking place which are quite unnecessary when they could be turning all the abandoned buildings into something amazing and making more use of it rather than it taking up place in each environment. The main reason I took the photographs in Forest Gate was because this has been worked on for a very long time now, which is very time consuming and doesn't make sense to be doing so at all.