The assignment brief was to ‘Create at least two sets of photographs telling different versions of the same story’. I have chosen to tell the story of party politics. The written press have historically been extremely influential in setting the political agenda. With the increase in social media and the mass volume of images, methods of communication and influence has changed. My assignment is a photojournalism piece showing how images can be taken and selected for publication to portray a biased message.
With my initial idea of Red (Good) and Blue (Bad) it transpired that the country was going to the polls. This was an opportunity that I wanted to take as it followed on from my EU Referendum [1] assignment in the EYV module. Interestingly the calling of the election was directly attributed to the Brexit vote and I saw it as a type of ‘aftermath’.
This time I wanted to include people going to the polling stations and capture their expressions. I would specifically pick fun and friendly people and add them to the positive ‘Red’ set. The more neutral and unfriendly people would be applied to the negative ‘Blue’ set. Although predominantly a photojournalism exercise I also needed to take contextual images of party signs so that each set had a political anchor. With more time and research I would like to have found settings where blue/red tones would convey the political slant.
The images would be placed in a ‘left leaning’ Sunday Supplement immediately following an election. Following a Labour victory the ‘Red’ set would be published alongside a positive upbeat election story. The ‘Blue’ set would be printed alongside a negative down beat article following a Conservative victory.
The Sunday supplement idea came from my research in to Don McCullin [2] who is best known for his war photography printed in The Times Sunday supplement in the 60s and 70s. Today it seems all print media has corporate backers and some editors make out they are impartial. When The Times was taken over in the 80s McCullin found that he no longer had creative control and subsequently moved on to other things.
My submission attempts to show that images can influence the viewers and readers in printed media. During the edit I found that I had a reasonable set of 10 images to make a ‘Positive Labour’ set of 5 and a ‘Negative Conservative’ set. During the shoot I took combinations to include both sides for each party. In some ways I feel that I could have achieved a stronger set if I only had to focus on one ‘angle’. Admittedly it was my decision to use the day of a General Election and so immediately provided myself with a challenge to do it all on one day.
Positive Labour
Negative Conservative
References
Martyn Rainbird 