Relationships assignment

So many possible subjects and so many interesting things to think about for this one. In the end I took the more conventional route, eschewing for several reasons such subjects including the one inspired by the Greeks’ relationship with God, visible at all times courtesy of their constant fiddling with little strings of worry beads in the hands of so many of the population. They even cross themselves when they go past a church on a bus here. More time and experience and I’d have thought this one through some more. After family, the relationship an individual has with God here is the second most important thing in life. I also thought about and discarded the idea of shooting my friend Andrew’s relationship with his ‘mistress’. Whilst his wife stews in their flat in London. Andrew spends his time restoring an old wooden yacht here in Volos. We even call ships ‘she’, and I was interested to see how I could approach the visual aspects of Andrew wooing his second love. Currently in dry dock, the yacht this week sees Andrew rubbing down the keel. The idea of photographing him caressing those luscious curves would be, after another six months on this course anyway, irresistible. Finally I glimpsed and immediately discarded an idea to shoot one person, using my relationship with them as the subject. Again, maybe some other time.

In the end I went for the following, all shot on a fairly wide lens because that’s how I like to see the world.

First up (Sco RELATIONSHIPS1), done I might add before I’d read the brief, are Joe and Susan. Susan and Joe’s mum are old family friends, and despite the fact that Susan lives in London and Joe and his mum are here in Greece, the relationship between all of them is very strong indeed. Susan is a retired music teacher, Joe a keen amateur musician. Each time Susan visits Greece she brings Joe a new book of music and they spend hours together going through it as well as working on Joe’s own compositions. I deliberately avoided the touchy-feely moments, opting to press the shutter during less immediately obvious intimate moments.

Second (Sco RELATIONSHIPS2) are Douglas and Allanah. As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, Douglas and Allanah are a retired English couple living high up on the mountain overlooking Volos and the sea. Until four years ago, Douglas wore the trousers in the relationship, then he had a massive stroke. Their relationship has completely reversed and it’s now Allanah who’s the carer. Douglas is fairly seriously although not entirely paralysed down the left-hand side of his body. His mind has also been quite badly damaged and is slow to both think and speak. It was difficult calling them to ask their permission to invade their life together, but that’s partly what I’m here on the course for. The shoot took a couple of hours, was shot at 1600ASA as the house is so dark inside and I wanted to avoid mistakes made during the first assignment, and covers a few moments of their life together shot as normally as I could make it. For reasons that I’m still trying to work out, the shots taken outdoors are a failure. Note I also make one of my regular appearances in a mirror. I’m always doing this!

Finally (Sco RELATIONSHIPS3), I was in the UK at the weekend where I was visiting my uncle who was 80 on Sunday. I had grand ideas to shoot one of the social events planned for the weekend, but for personal reasons it just didn’t work out the way I’d seen it in my mind. So, what you get here breaks all the assignment rules, being shot with a not fully manual camera (for this I blame the several large glasses of red wine I drank earlier in the day), at a ridiculous 3200ASA, and with lots of shots missing. I felt too involved to really get under the skin of this one, and perhaps it was empathy that led me to consciously take several pictures of one of my cousin’s sons, who, by far the youngest person attending the two events shown here and having had a particularly difficult childhood, like myself and my camera, clearly felt like an outsider. Most of these pictures were snapped, so the composition of the majority of them are nothing to write home about, but I do believe I’ve captured a sense of isolation with these last pictures.

All in all a most thought-provoking brief.