Home

When thinking of Home, my mind immediately goes to Scotland. I have never lived there, yet every year for the last 8 or so years, my family and I have taken 2 weeks in the Scottish highlands. This made me wonder if it was actually the place that held such meaning to me or the people I was there with.

This thought led to this series of images. The idea behind them was showing the areas I was most attached to; the places I felt comfortable calling ‘home’ and connecting them to the people that make it ‘home’.

The images of myself and my family (1, 2, 5 and 6) all have images of the Scottish Isle of Skye blended with them. This firmly connects the most important people to me to the place I feel most at home. I don’t know if one is because of the other, but its the way I feel. These images are highly personal, therefore they probably wouldn’t have the same emotional impact on a wider audience as they do to me. But I did not set out with this brief to make images that resonate with others, I wanted something that reflects my state of mind now that I live in Lincoln; somewhere other than where I used to call home and without the people who I am most comfortable around.

The other two pictures (3 and 4) show two of my friends from college that also came to Lincoln Uni with me. I’ve known them both going on 3 years now, and consider them quite close. Blended with their portraits are pictures of London. I myself am from East London, and I have a great fondness for the City. It isn’t the same as my love of Scotland, but its definitely somewhere I have felt confident and comfortable traversing. These warm feelings are some that I associate with my friends; people that I have walked around on the streets on London with and had laughs and adventures.

 

For the technical side of creating these images, I used all photos that I had taken myself. Some are more than two years old, whereas some I took specifically for this project. I found that while making these in photoshop, both of the source images had to be of very high quality, otherwise the end product would look slapdash. It took a lot of experimentation to get the look I wanted to achieve. However the end product is something I am pretty happy with. I think that by having that portrait images in black and white, it really gives the landscape photos a chance to shine. However the portraits aren’t forgotten as they are separate from the background, which I wanted to be a nondescript grey, just for the purpose of making the whole compiled image stand out.

 

There is a reason I have included a self portrait in this brief. The idea behind that was that at the moment I am in a transitionary period. I am not yet attached enough to Lincoln to call it home, nor do any of my new friends serve as anchors to this area as I have known them only a short while. Therefore, for now at least, home is me. In that I mean that I serve as my own anchor to this area, for as long as I am happy here I call this place home.