After ditching the Moss Side idea I began thinking about interesting areas that I could photograph in Manchester, even though I could have focused on a different area I decided to keep it to Manchester. While thinking about Manchester I began realizing how culturally diverse the city is, so I began researching into this.
I found an article online published by the Daily Mail in 2012 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248956/Europes-exotic-city-Its-Manchester-153-languages-spoken-population-500-000.html) , stating how Manchester was one of Europe's and the worlds most exotic countries. What they meant by 'exotic' was how diverse it was, they measured this diversity on how many languages were spoken within the area. In Manchester there is at least 153 languages spoken by a population of 500,000, whereas London has over 300 languages spoken but with a population of over 8 million. This shows that relative to size, Manchester has a hugely diverse mix of population, furthermore London's large mix was also due to its passing business population, whereas Manchester's population mix was mostly residents who actually live within the area. Around two thirds of Mancunian school children are bilingual which enforces how precious its linguistic culture is.
This large mix of culture within Manchester can be accounted for a number of factors. It had rapid growth in the Industrial Revolution, in the textile industry which attracted many foreigners to the area, begining its diverse nature. Manchester's policy of employing workers from abroad for the public services and NHS also strengthened this mix. Lastly there a two huge universities, which are arguably two of the largest in population size found in the UK, which are found in the Manchester area. These universities have many foreign students which increase diversity statistics for the area.
It's obvious that cultural diversity is very important to Manchester so this would be a good thing to focus on for my project in which I'm looking at documentary portraiture. This means capturing portraits of people in the environment that they were already in, so not taking them out of their environment and shooting them in a studio surrounding. Capturing residents would be a good way of showing Manchester's diversity in a photographic medium but as I've discussed previously it would take time to get a good 'in' into this environment. Equally just capturing peoples portraits on the street isn't enough because it doesn't actually represent Manchester's population, due to the subjects may being tourists who don't live in the area.
I could focus on different shopping area's of Manchester because they all have different cultural mixes of people. Furthermore, if I focus on the actual shop owners/ workers it means that I will be representing the population of Manchester more truthfully because the subjects actually live and work in the area.
So next I will begin looking into different shopping areas of Manchester to photograph.