The concept of my project is going to be following someone around a city centre. I think I am going to title the project "Big Brother Is Watching You". Living in York, the city is surrounded by the old walls which you can walk along. Taking my photographs from the walls would give me a good vantage point, looking down on passers by, as if the images were being taken from a surveillance camera. I originally thought that I wanted to just photograph anyone and everyone, then I came to the idea that there would be a bigger impact if there was a character involved who was in every single picture. This links to Jill Magid's Evidence Locker project where she spent 31 days in Liverpool county council and Merseyside Police to access CCTV logs of herself on camera. She wore a red coat to be distinctive and stand out. If a character is involved in my photographs I think it will have a bigger impact on the audience who view my project and they can put themselves in the position of the character in the images. I will use Magid's project as inspiration for this project, however instead of trying to access CCTV footage of myself I will take photographs in the style of a CCTV camera using a model. I also intend on trying to take photographs of my model on actual surveillance screens. This will give a different aspect to the final set of photographs that I produce. I will look at the work of Lee Friedlander who is famous for photographing television screens in an abstract way. I would also quite like to photograph a few security and surveillance cameras to show just how many you could find and what different types of cameras there are.
I am going to present my project in the form of an Installation. I think that I will use both printed images of my model walking around and possibly have a slideshow of images as well. Another option for an installation to emphasise the theme of "big brother is watching you" would be to have a camera set up with a live feed on a television screen showing the people who are viewing my photographs. The camera could be set up facing the doorway where my exhibition is being shown, and when people come in to view it they would see themselves on a television screen. I think this would be an effective way of getting my point across, however it may be very expensive to set up so it may not be feasible. Another option would be to record videos of either anyone and everyone walking down the street, or record videos of my model walking down the street and have it playing on a television screen on a loop.
I intend on taking my images in good quality on my DSLR camera and edit them in Photoshop afterwards to make them look like they were taken on a security camera. I will either make them black and white or slightly dull them down so that the viewer is still drawn to my model as I am going to try to get her to stand out with her clothing. I may reduce the saturation and add noise to make them look like the quality of a surveillance camera. Resources I will need will be a DSLR camera (for photographs), possibly a video camera, a tripod for a video camera, editing software (photoshop), a model and some form of bright/stand out clothing, printing resources - paper and ink, editing software for any video produced and to potentially put sounds over the video (premiere pro).
My timescale for the project is approximately two weeks. I will need to plan carefully and arrange times with my model and allocate times for editing my imagery and arranging everything I will need for my installation.
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