Katie Makepeace’s creative work for first year module, The Personal Portfolio.
21st July 2021
From my point of view, ‘The Personal Portfolio’ project was the most enjoyable, but also the most challenging to achieve in my first year. This project was about us showing our specialism within photography and having figured out that I loved to photograph landscapes (travel) and interiors in college- as well as being offered some work experience photographing interiors through my course leader before this project commenced, I thought I knew exactly what I was going to be doing. However, my plan had to rapidly change when COVID-19 took priority once again. I feel this helped push my creativity in a different direction, as I felt torn about whether to base my project on interiors or landscapes. However, with the feedback from my lecturer and my peers, it became clear I needed to combine the two specialisms, in order to create my own. This is how I came up with the idea to put interior furniture into landscapes, as it eliminated the issues with the COVID rules and still meant I could show what my work is all about.
Image 1: ‘Breakfast in bed’- In the first of my series I show an idyllic start to any sunny morning with a breakfast in bed set-up. In conjunction, to help show the beginning of the series, I created a vintage-like stamp to the top left corner reading ‘a day in lockdown 2021.’
Image 2: ‘The morning routine’- Each of the close-up images supports the wide overview to give more context to the narrative within my series. In this case, it shows the process of getting ready for the day, even if that day may be based in a ‘home’ environment.
Image 3: ‘Working from home’- I chose to make one part of my series about working from home, as during the pandemic we have all experienced, many of us can relate to having to adapt our way of working in order to carry on. Therefore, I have tried to capture the international opinion of working from ‘the soft office’ in a clear and minimalist way.
Image 4: ‘Afternoon dog walk’- When planning this series, I found it difficult to find an activity suitable to associate with the afternoon, especially within lockdown, where we were so limited to what we could do. After discussing with my peers, I concluded on the idea of ‘walking the dog’, as I feel this can be a post-work/school activity, which could still be recognised as an afternoon activity during lockdown.
Image 5: ‘Evening wind down’- Since deciding to create this day in the life series, I knew I wanted one or more images to be situated in the dark. As one of my first experimental furniture in landscape images, I changed in post-production to be in the dark, adding stars and making the lamp look like it was turned on. Therefore, I always had a clear vision of the final image for this series and even though it was harder to shoot the second time around, I am pleased with the result I have managed to create.