ONE SQUARE MILE Assignment : Proposal

The square mile that I want to photograph is York City Centre. I would like to photograph the aspect of tourism as York is a hugely popular place for tourists and visitors. I could approach my project in different ways. One way would be to show how busy York is with tourists, photographing them (e.g. a group of chinese people with cameras), photographing the York City Sightseeing buses and how busy they are, photographing the people who work in the tourist offices etc. Since I am a York resident and have a YorkCard I have access to all the major attractions including the sightseeing buses for free so I could go into these places and photograph them from a tourists perspective. I could photograph tourists on the buses and photograph the city from the sightseeing tours too.

I could also approach it by photographing interesting characters around the city. There are lots of interesting characters around York, such as the Purple Man who sits on a bike all day, a man who advertises the ghost walk who is dressed up in costume, a man who stands outside the Jorvik Centre dressed up in costume, someone who stands outside the York Dungeons who's dressed in costume, and endless amounts of street artists positioning themselves in various places around the city.

I am going to shoot my project using a few different styles at first - I will use street photography and take pictures of tourists walking around York. I would also like to use landscape and architecture photography and take pictures of the area of York and the buildings etc to see what they look like in my set. If I take pictures of landscape and architecture these could set the scene of my project so people know where these interesting people dressed in costume are from rather than just a set of photographs of interesting people. I would also like to take some portraits of people using an external flash gun on a tripod. Once I have tested out a few of these different styles I will review them and see what is working and what isn't and take my project from there.

My first idea when I thought of the theme of tourism in York was to take pictures of the tourists and all the attractions and sightseeing buses, however, when I saw these images by James Mollison I came up with the idea of taking pictures of the interesting characters in York who are dressed in costume.

I have found a couple of images of the people in York who I want to photograph :

I like this photograph because it shows some of the background and gives the viewer a bit of information about where it has been taken. Since York has such beautiful architecture I think it would be good to include some of it in the background of my image then my audience has a better idea that my documentary project is about York rather than just people in costume.

This is the Purple Man in York. He is probably one of the most famous street artists. He usually is positioned down Stonegate sat on a purple bike with a purple dog in a purple basket. I have taken some photographs of him before on my phone and he is quite happy to have his photograph taken, so hopefully so will be a lot of the people in York.

I like Zed Nelsons style in how he mixes lots of different types of photography together such as studio, street photography, indoor, outdoor etc.

I think that I may begin shooting my project like this by taking lots of photographs in different styles. I will begin by taking photographs of York, it's architecture and tourist attractions. I will then focus on street photography and take pictures of tourists, show them queuing up to get into places, show them photographing the city, show them on guided walking tours around the city. Then I want to photograph some of the interesting characters. I will use documentary portraiture to get images of people who work in the tourist attractions. For this I think I will use an off camera flash gun on a tripod. I also would quite like to take pictures of the people who work in tourism but are not necessarily dressed up for a living such as people who work on the desk at the tourist information centre, and in the foyer's of the attractions themselves.

Martin Parr :

I would like to use these three images as inspiration for my tourism in York project. They all communicate a similar theme that I want to communicate with my One Square Mile project. The first image shows an interesting character in a normal place with normal people surrounding him. I would like to take photographs like this because there are lots of people dressed up in York who would look strange when surrounded by normal people in the background. The second image shows people looking into a shop window at what appears to be a souvenir shop. This is another thing that I want to capture about York - how there are lots of things that are aimed at tourist like souvenir shops. The third image doesn't really connect to my tourism in York but it is very obvious what it is communicating - British people celebrating the wedding of William and Kate. I would like people who see my set of images to be able to tell what it is about when they look at them.

Martin Amis :

I would like to use these three images as inspiration for my own project because they do a very good job of describing a place through a set of photographs. These images clearly show a seaside town in Britain. Amis could have photographed lots of aspects of the town but the viewer might not know that they had been taken in the same place. He has done a good job of choosing exactly what to photograph so that the viewer knows that all the images were taken in the same place. I would like to do this with my set of images for the One Square Mile project. I would like to be able to photograph lots of different aspects in York and my viewer will be able to still tell it is York no matter which picture they are looking at.