Commission: Initial ideas for shoot

From my research and inspiration which I have blogged about I came up with some possible shoot ideas; I found a box of my baby clothes in the attic as well as my mum's wedding dress, some of her mother's clothing and dresses from me and my sister's various proms. I really liked how I was able to find some of them in images in many of our photo albums, a certain memory associated with the clothes.

I then started taking photographs of some of the clothes with the images of them from photo albums. I tried a couple of times to get to a scanner in uni but didn't manage to so I used a light to photograph my negatives; this created interesting results which I quite liked in the way it metaphorically represents the fading of memory. It is also highlighting the way that clothes can link to a certain memory/moment in time, they look as if they could be trapped in time, unattainable.

However some of my initial choices of clothes matching the images weren't particularly special, inspired by 'My Mother's Wedding Dress' book I started thinking about outfits that only get used once in a person's lifetime which will leads to materialistic waste through different themes eg. hoarding, keeping things as a keepsake, memories, traces.

These are the following clothes that I plan to use in my photoshoot to highlight my theme of materialistic waste:

- My nan's function dress- she often had these handmade for functions that she went to in the 60s due to my Grandad being in the Marines. She would barely ever use them more than once such as the dress above, (unfortunately I couldn't find this specific dress but a similar one that would have had the same outcome) and then it would be stored away literally and metaphorically in memory, this causes materialistic waste and waste of labour as they would have been specially made to be used once.

- My mum's wedding dress- this is a very obvious one-use item of clothing, never used again by the same person, stored away as a memory despite having all of the photographs from the day. We as human beings seem to have this need to use all our senses when remembering things which in most cases is a constructive thing however in this case is waste- using touch, sight, smell etc. Both of these images & items of clothing link back to a time I don't have any personal memory which I feel heightens this need to a variety of sensory connections. In America, there are approx. 2.5 million wedddings every year, this creates a very shocking estimated amount of wedding dresses newly bought which of majority will not be recycled generating a huge amount of waste in America alone.

- My christening dress- a personal memory obviously too early to remember personally, a very important memory and time in my life and stages in most people's lives eg. christening, holy communion, birthdays, weddings etc.

- My sister's prom dress- the clearest and most recent memory for all of us and in a way interestingly the most vibrant as if this reflects how much memory has faded in the other three events all over 18 years old in our family.

- All events are from different female figures in my immediate family- three different generations & they are all very important moments that we will most likely all go through.

After I began trying out ways to recreate poses in the images I first thought about having the images next to each other similar to Irina Werning's recreations but I started to think it would be better if they were just alone, the void which the audience have to fill in, can then relate to them and draw up their own personal experiences and the way that they have wasted these items of clothing through either throwing them away, losing them or storing them in the attic and in turn in a way this has therefore metaphorically wasted away their memories. 

These are my intial experiments with ways to construct a human form:

With the top two I used a light duty wire to build framework to bulk out the clothing in the way they are in the photographs; I gathered the christening dresses material in a similar way as well as padding out the arms with bubblewrap and pinning them in place which I think is very effective. Meanwhile for the function/ball dress again I bulked it out with a wire frame pinning it into the dress and then I stitched black thread into the top allowing me to hang it at the level it would have been when worn.

For my mother's wedding dress and probably my sister's prom dress I would use a mannequin as it makes it quite easy to get the correct height etc. and again I would pin the arms in the right places. I went out last weekend and bought 5 metres of black fabric, when shooting I will create a backdrop with the material and then cover the mannequins neck and chest area (whatever is showing) so that when shooting it would blend in with the background creating the look of it floating without a human form inside.

I have chosen black material to create this sense of a void, the item of clothing has been frozen in time at the moment that it was used always stuck at this point, never to be worn again, a wasted material of our society. It gives this sense of fragility & feeling that it is untouchable, but also unlocated from use, it could also be a metaphor for the wasted space all of these items are being held in.