Inspiration of the Week - Sylvia de Swaan

Sylvia de Swaan is a photographer born in Romania in 1941, at age ten she immigrated to the United States. She has also lived and worked in Europe and Mexico. Her work is usually focused around specific projects and follows themes that are common to her work. These themes are: identity, personal history, individualism and collective memory.

The project that I am going to look at is her photography series titled Return.

In these series of photographs she looks back on her Jewish heritage and her Eastern European background. In some of her images she uses a combination of old photographs and images from her journey. Some of these pictures are taken on the train journey between destinations, this shows de Swaan’s physical journey, but could also symbolise her spiritual journey into her heritage and ancestry as she returns to her family’s home.

In my next project I am looking into doing a sort of journey and also how to document some of it. These photographs are very interesting and document a lot more than writing down words could.

I also feel that they aren't typical documentary photographs but the viewer is still able to follow the narrative of the journey.

I am also still looking for a purpose for my work and I think that Sylvia de Swaan's purpose here is very personal and poignant as she is going on a journey retracing her family' journey.

NB - all photographs here have been taken from the artist's site:
http://www.sylviadeswaan.com/
http://www.sylviadeswaan.com/return
I do not own any of the pictures on this post.

Until next time,
byyyyyeeeeeeeeeeee
Róisín -x

Non-places

So after our hand in of the pencils brief we were then given our new brief called 'Non-Places' which is a philosophical theory on what defines a place. I'm not going to go into too much detail about that seeing is it is an extremely deep concept which you could argue about for hours, so I'll just let you google it and make up your own mind. :P

So I'm kind of going between a few ideas at the moment, but I think the one I might try and stick to is my idea of looking at where youths go to hang out as normally these would be classed as non-places, like walls and stairwells etc. By them choosing to sit in these areas, they then change the definition of these non-places into places. (This brief is so confusing) I also have considered looking into social media as well, but I'm not sure if this was widen the topic too much. I might also branch out into looking at how as children the places we go are determined by our parents mostly, and as adults we tend to only ever go to "places" like work, home, bars etc.

Anyway now I'm just going to spam you with my sketchbook pages that I have so far. ;)

So that is where I am at with this project hopefully I can get some form of clear direction but I'm planning on talking to some of my lecturers on Monday to help give me some focus,

so until then
byye :)

Róisín - x