Title & Project Description [250 words]

Your project description should be written as if for a potential curator or publisher of your work (i.e. it should not be informal). You should reflect on the inspiration for your project and the relationship of the images to the title. You should also comment on the style/form you have chosen (eg. documentary) and on the idea/subject matter itself. Try to place your work in the wider context of the genre you have chosen you may mention an influence here. 



Title: Dad

Description: 

Dad is a creative photographic project composed by George Whale. Initially, the project's aim was to tell a personal 'picture story' (Bate, D. 2010, p.46) of his father. However, Dad developed into a project that embodies the approach of environmental portraiture, with elements of documentary, lifestyle and vernacular photography all present within Whale’s collection of images.
Inspired by the works of Richard Billingham, Tina Barney and Richard Harkin, Whale's photographs tell a visual story about his father’s identity within his family and society by capturing his subject in environments in which he carries out his everyday lifestyle activities and spends his leisure time. By focusing his project on a personal subject, Whale takes up the role of being an eyewitness to his subject's lifestyle activities and he positions his audience to gaze at the subject through his own eyes, observing Whale's interpretation of his own father's identity.

Whale choses to photograph his subject in natural environments and manipulates the elements of portraiture discussed by Bate in Photography: The Key Concepts such as the props and his subject's costume to create ideologies about the subject's personality. "It is thought that you will be able to better illuminate their character, and therefore portray the essence of their personality, rather than merely a likeness of their physical features"  (Hilton 1999) which is why Whale choses to photograph his subject in settings that they feel comfortable in.Using a Nikon D300 to accomplish his project, Whale's environmental portraits exhibit an authentic portrayal of his subject's identity and uses the art of semiotics and the construction of mise-en-scène to exaggerate certain qualities of his father's character. 

Bibliography

Bate, D. (2010) Photography: The Key Concepts, Berg: Oxford, New York. 

Hilton, J. (1999) Special Occasion Photography (Pro-Photo Series), : RotoVision.