FMP Ideas

For my final major project I have been toying with a few ideas; I'd like the pieces I choose to exhibit to reflect my strengths as well as my interests, so my chosen medium will definitely be film, be it large, medium or 35mmm-format.

I rather like the idea of a very traditional black and white series, uniform prints all mounted and framed however I am struggling with a subject.
One idea was to showcase unusual homes and buildings, for example I often notice the odd little houses that don't match the rest of the street.

e.g This little cottage on School Road, Shirley is right in the middle of a mixture of houses, opposite some very ordinary suburban homes:

This one on Blossomfield Road is completely different from the surrounding homes, it’s facing away from the road which to me suggests it could possibly be older than the road itself:

This crooked house is a few hundred yards from Claverdon railway station and is structurally a million miles from the huge houses that are its neighbours:

There are loads of weird and wonderful places like this around this area, and I am genuinely fascinated by them, they’re little anachronisms standing stoically in the middle of “Metroland” ribbon developments.

I would have to recce lots of locations to pursue this idea, and contact the owners of the homes to get permission to photograph them, especially if I were to use a large format camera.

I should also think about how I would convey the idea of them being different to their surroundings with or without including other houses in the frame.


I have also considered making the most of my home in Wales as  a base for exploring Snowdonia and photographing the welsh mountains, however having to rely on the Welsh weather and waiting for the right lighting conditions would mean completing a series within the given time scale would prove difficult.

Another (radically different) idea was to do a series looking at people who not only work with their hands but are reliant on machines. This stems from my interest in tattooing and it may work well to pursue other professions rather than focusing solely on tattooing and body modification.

For example, a tattooist is reliant on a machine to reproduce an image onto skin; a photographer is reliant on a camera to reproduce an image in print; a hairdresser/barber is reliant on their scissors and razor to provide their service; so I thought of photographing the tools of the trade in some way, focusing mainly on them in the hands of their operators rather than the actual people.

Staying with the tattoo theme I also have considered using the tattoo machines to create a portrait of the artist.

Whilst researching tattoo artists I came across an exhibition of oil paintings by the tattooist Nikko Hurtado, and this particular piece caught my eye:

I set about making a copy of this image to see how well it could work as a photograph, and managed to find a frame in a pound shop, chopped up a red velvet skirt from a charity shop and used cheap costume jewellery (also from a charity shop) to recreate this for myself.

I borrowed a tattoo machine and grip, and after stretching the fabric over the back of the frame, propped the machine up on nails; I used two household lamps to light it and this was the result.














It cost less than a tenner to make, and as a practice I am very happy indeed with it, however it looks much better as a cropped image (which could then be displayed in a rococo frame to better mimic the original):

I would expand this still-life kind of set-up by constructing a themed composition to reflect the personalities and tastes of each artist, like a portrait of them using their machines.