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Week 6-7-8 Telling Tales

Updated: 20 hours ago

During week 6, we looked at narrative photography, and photographers such as Ken Grant and Hannah Starkey. This also started the last guided project; Telling Tales. 

For the guided project I decided to look at Re-Photography, to tell the story of how a place in my town has changed over the years. Talking about re-photography, “The basic idea was to find the locations from which historical photographs had been taken and then make new photos” (Fradkin et al., 2006). I decided to do this by using my own archives. 

Re-photography is often used in science to see landscape changes, however it can be used by people to show historical differences, or even replicate scenes from film and TV; much like the images below.


(Cliff, 2023) (Mendes, 2012)


(Valentine, 1933)(Gillanders, 2023)

This type of photography can be educational, or emotional; however it is often overlooked as it can be found everywhere. The internet is full of before and after images, people recreating their family photographs, showing a house when they first moved in and again after renovations. Where these images will be so easily found, its “power to engage the public visually is diluted by its ubiquity.” (McLeod et al., 2014)

For my project I have found some archival images of the docks in my local town, and gone to retake them. I found some access issues where parts of the docks are chained closed and inaccessible, however I tried to recreate the angle on each image, as well as taking some extra images of the state that the docks are in.

After editing viable images, I had to cut some out, and chose 10 images, which I then combined with archival images to create a photobook.



Looking at the ‘photobook’ I created, I thought about replacing some of the images with pictures of them inside the newspaper, where I have had those images featured in the local papers. I experimented with adding them, however after talking to my peers and tutor, I came to the conclusion that it looked better how I had done it originally.

I originally thought that this work would look best as a photobook, which is how I then laid it out using Lightroom. However, upon giving it some more thought, I think it would work best as an exhibition in the town as a part of a larger protest about the state of the docks. One thought that came to mind would be to take the images and have them blown up and exhibited at the docks, perhaps tied to the railings, although I feel for it to have the most impact, it would need to be only archive shots where the docks are full. This could also be paired with data, such as the scientific data I found and collected whilst studying the docks for my environmental sciences coursework in 2016, as well as the council’s archival photographs of the equipment that is still there, such as the cranes and locks.

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