I chose these three images for my final pieces because I think they best represent my project, which was on cultural diversity in manchester through taking portraits of the workers within the city. The reason I have only chosen three was because I wanted to have one or two final piece's from each of the three places that I ended up photographing which was Chinatown, Northern Quarter and the Curry Mile. I chose two final images to represent each area at the start but then I looked over the images and thought that these three were my strongest. They also represented each different area well, and they are all women from different cultures, so I decided to again have a strong set of final images that all work well together and just print off three final pieces. Like my first project, I'm going to print them A3 on a high gloss paper, so the viewer can see the best quality from the print.
Evaluation
I knew from the start of my project that I wanted to do a documentary/ portraiture project on a specific community. My first thought was to focus my project on the area of Moss Side in Manchester because I thought this would be an interesting place to photograph. I was either going to do this by looking at either the gang culture in the area or just the general community, but I hadn't decided what route to follow for my project. To help me decide this route I first looked into Adam Patterson who has a very specific style of documentary in which he followed the progress of one family, this project really inspired me to do something similar. I soon began realising that to complete this project to the extent I wanted would've taken to much time to get the trust and connections from the people who the project would have documented and seen as I only had a few months to finish the project I decided to change my idea, I will remember this idea for future projects when I have a longer time to complete them.
I then just started thinking about Manchester in general and realised how culturally diverse it was, after doing some research into this and finding the facts of how diverse it actually was I decided to base my project on Cultural Diversity in Manchester. So I then began thinking of how I could represent the population of Manchester, which is when I decided to focus my portraits on the workers in Manchester. I did this because if I photographed people from the street, they might not be residents and this would then not represent Manchester's cultural diversity within its residents. Looking at the time I had to complete my project I decided to focus my portraits of shop workers in three different areas of Manchester which were Chinatown, Northern Quarter and Curry Mile, I chose these three because they all had very individual themes behind them which I thought would be more interesting for the viewer to look at than normal shops. These areas also represent the Manchester's cultural diversity in themselves as well. The two photographers that influenced my work the most were Franck Bohbot because his idea was really similar to mine, and also August Sander who's influence can be seen throughout my project. The development I made through this project was not in the idea, which was my development for my Looking at Place project, it was how I actually took captured the portraits.
If I were to do the project again I would mix image and text together, so ask the people I photograph their cultural background and incorporate it into my final pieces somehow. This would then make it really obvious to the viewer the different kind of cultural diversity Manchester has. I think I would also get the names of each of my subject so for the final piece's the viewers could read where their culture is from and their name, this would provide more information for the viewer to go along side the visual information. I feel that over the course of my project I improved my portrait taking techniques a lot, and I really enjoyed the project, so I will definitely focus on documentary/ portrait work in the future. Something else that I have improved on is taking portraits of people on location, where I have no control to the subjects surroundings, meaning I have to just work with what I've got. This was one of my favourite projects so far on the course and one which I feel improved my photographic skills greatly, as well as me being really pleased with my final images.