HOME : preliminary research
This started as a brain noodle and has expanded into something much larger. To be honest, 10 days or so into thinking about this, I am not sure it's the right project for now to create a body of work from.
So when faced with the brief to create a body of work, I think I immediately fell into the thinking of my photography background of a project or theme based piece. Home came to mind as a way to maybe work on some architectural drawing and some interiors. But I am not sure if I am confusing what I like to look at and what I like to draw.
Anyway, here is a research dump. If this project isn't for now, maybe it's for later so nothing wasted.
Home research
My own brain dump
Your home is built by yourself or perhaps your parents or loved ones.
How we talk about it as a place but also as something abstract
Homecoming
Perhaps home changes over time - childhood home, marital home.
Is home a fixed place
Is home a decision or a choice
House vs Home
Is a house just a shelter. Can it be our house but not our home
Can it just be a place we live without being a home
Is homeless a correct term if we consider home as something other than or more than simply shelter.
Is ownership tied to home or can it be temporary or rented
Museum of home - potential visit
66 Sandhurst Road - my first home, found address from my uncle Keiran. Also lived at 71 Sussex Drive, # Priory Road, Dartford, Franklin Road, Louisville Avenue, Milton Road, Julius Strasse Hamburg, Rosemary Lane / ?, Wodehouse Terrace, Rother Vale, Roxburgh Road.
Sat in Curve coffee shop - skooch table. Friday midday as found out not in court this pm. Tired and frustrated but ok too. How to draw why I enjoy it in here right now. Good staff - brought me water and my coffee / nice exchange when ordering - view from window - coffee - ambiance - being amongst people while alone / some eating some working some catching up singles and couples two Italian greyhounds - music playlist super chilled jazz reggae.
Home is this AND that
Create as Diptychs
Ideas:
Sal and Dolly
Greengrocers and Butchers
Cinema and cafe
Sea and green
Interior and exterior
Details and macro
Rooftops
Feels like home - it’s a feeling created by what ?
Is home defined by Maslows hierarchy of needs ?
Project genesis came from Part 5 of Drawing 1 on OCA course but feels like a continuation of all the photography from over the years exploring Place as a subject matter
Couple of days in my head and fleshed out a little more with a dinner table conversation with Greg, Nicci, Karen, Sonja and Sal 21/07/2023
Places
People
Doing
Home / house place feeling
Architecture and proximity to beach and indies drew us here. What keeps Us here. Friends.
Flat was horrible but had potential, Potential realised ed now. Is it home ?
How will reading Bauhaus book influence what I am doing
Research / inspiration
David Gentleman book
Christoph Niemann travel work
Sergio Larrain Valparaiso
Magnum Photos Home
LS Lowry
Check Mind Map
Hockney - painting 30 miles around his home
https://www.larrysultan.com/gallery/pictures-from-home/
George Butler exhibition
Modern art exhibition
Fast and sketchy - studied - stylised Rory Kennedy
Viewfinder composition
From low
From high
Kids n shelter
sea swimmers - ladies and general
early morning late evening
exercisers
Mews Adrian Sq
Jackson stables
Cinema
Fredericks
Mosque
Antique shops
Our home
Rooftops
At Mildred’s Court
Ellie’s balcony
Drawn map of Westgate
Does our property location put it at the heart of our home
Research - What does home mean
Matt Gibberd - A Modern Way to Live
A home acts as a sanctuary and sometimes even as a sanatorium during uncertain times. It is a place where we ca truly be ourselves.
Our emotional attachment to our homes can almost be as strong as our emotional attachment to other people. Home environments are key in defining who we are are, so much so that we almost feel they are part of us. Lily Bernheimer Environmental psychologist
Mick Buston
Irish family have always asked when I am coming home. I’m first generation English, so I consider England as my home in comparison to Ireland at least, a place I have visited maybe less than 10 times in my life, mostly as a child with little memory of it.
Nicci
Home is where I can be myself. Its not the building or the artefacts
Karen
I don’t have a home
Sal
Considers Wales to be part of her home being born there despite leaving young.
Kevin
Kenny is back home now after being in hospital. Home is shared space with others with need of support to live independently
Magnum
16 Magnum photographers tackled the theme HOME in conjunction with camera manufacturers Fujifilm. Below is a transcript of relevant pieces from their intro videos.
Alex Webb -
The place in the world I’m most at ease in - Cape Cod
Photographing the feel of the landscape
A beach he visited a lot as a child
He photographs and travels all over the world
Alec Soth
When I think of home in the broadest terms, I think of Minnesota
Never moved when he became successful
Real affinity for middle america
Trying to understand on a very simple level what this place means to me
Walking to work
Photography as a way of exploring the world and my relationship to the world
Alesandra Sanguinetti
Photography has given me a sense of belonging. For the short while I am working, I feel like I am part of something
I tend to gravitate towards people, portraits, storytelling, I like to follow people through time, to observe them, to watch peoples gestures, how they act, how they move
Photography gives you an excuse to look at somebody for a very long time
Home is I guess, where I am safe, where I am understood and where the people I love are
Learned about the project when at her parents home in Argentina
She refers to always wanting to do something around her childhood home
Moises Saman
For me home is a very difficult concept because I was born in Peru but I grew up in Spain and I lived in America, Middle East and Japan and so I have been moving around a lot
For me it was important to go back to Peru and to get to know the country where I was born but its a country that I don’t know very well because I haven’t really spent much time in the past so its like searching for my home in a way
From almost 4800 metres in the Andes to the coast, the Amazon, the scenery, the people, the food, the culture, it’s really amazing and diverse
Its strange, I feel the sort of connection but at the same time a disconnection to the place
Mark Power
I think my immediate reaction was to make something which was personal
One of his children leaving home to go to Uni.
Photograph our family life within this home but also to go on a series of long walks away from the front door … walking for as long as it takes
I made a couple of forays down to the beach …. lucky with the weather… stormy and raining
But its very hard to feel like I am not dealing with a cliche here
I have to think where the work is going - its going to be seen in NY and Jpn so I do need to root my real home to the coast of Britain
MP trying to weare an Xray of Kodak the dog injury into project given to him by hospital as very different from the project aesthetic
I am particularly interested in how certain pictures bounce of each other and change the meaning of each rather than cancelling each other out
Photography tends to have a relationship with the exotic which usually means somewhere else rather than where you are from because it is traditionally quite difficult to photograph somewhere which is very familiar to you.
I’ve been going out of my way to find these little corners making these very quiet, some may say very dull pictures but this is quite representative, I think, of my home where I live.
First and foremost I want to get this right for me.
I decided to think about what home meant for me and I think its where my family is gathered.
The status quo is not always maintained
I’m happy because I feel, well it is, an honest response its just whether or not its going to communicate to other people or interest others.
Gueorgui Pinkhassov
I spent my childhood here, went to University. These people sent me off to the Army and welcomed me home. My parents lived here. Our relatives came to visit and our neighbours. The place of my childhood and my youth. My paternal home so to speak.
Truth be told …. spend very little time at home.
Each of us has a passion for new things, new knowledge.
its a story of homecoming. Something I’m doing right now, coming home
Just like the hero with his hopes and dreams, only he could not make it back, he stayed.
In this house given to him by the Ocean, a virtual home
My home is virtual as well, it’s in my head. I remember my parents, friends and relatives.
All who came here. And it exists.
Thats why I’ve left this apartment untouched
it tells the story of an era
I treat it as a museum, with care, do not change anything, even though I am its owner
This is my home, my apartment, the crossroads of my memory
I belong to the school of realism, despite the fact that my pictures are sometimes very fluid and metaphorical
I like capturing my doubts in my photos, there is something refreshing in it
Trent Park
Home to me is Australia - the place I was born, the place I grew up
Its important for me when I am photographing that memory and experience that I have a unique feeling and understanding of the place that I am in. That that comes through in the photographs that I take. So Australia is my country, it’s what I love. I love this place. So thats where I choose to take photographs
As a result of where I am right now in my life right now, it has to have some sort of communication to what I am feeling at this moment in time. This very moment in my life, city of Adelaide is where I live. The light here is amazing and thats what I am trying to express in my photos a lot of the time, this very unique light that Australia has. Everything I have shot in my life has been autobiographical, it has been part of my life. It has to mean something to me. if it means something to me, generally it will have some sort of feeling on someone else.
Time brings me to a specific place in memory and a place of feeling that I knew and felt at that moment
Alex Majoli
Let me dive in this project and see what’s coming out
Home is my kids for sure
Home is also where I grew up - the place I ran away from, I never want to leave there. I have a lot o tied relationships in my memory so I want to go back there. So home is all this. New York I will take pictures
Hiroji Kubota
Japan consists of many islands. Here is my home, I am a Japanese.
The Seto Inland see characterises my country best, in my opinion.
The Inland see is dotted with small islands
The complex scenery can be captured only from the sky above
David Alan Harvey
I’m a very home orientated person in the first place, very family orientated, very home orientated.
Wherever I am, I am always bringing up in my hard drive, my sense of home
Well I think I want to photograph both landscape and people
This is going to go underwater in 20 years, no really, this area is not going to exist
Because these islands are moving all the time. Their is no permanence to this place.
Still only a few people, a few authors, a few people with a special voice and a real sense of something to say. Those people will use photography in a different way to other people.
Elliott Erwitt
Well, I’m interpreting the Home title by taking pictures in my home, in my studio and in the area where I live part of the time and by the ocean in East Hampton
It means the place that I live and work out of
I don’t take baths, I take showers so home would be more towards the shower
Magnum is my home in a sense
Its where I’ve been for the last 50 or more years
Its my home in the sense of colleagues and career, in the sense of everything really,
I think when the connection between the dog and me
I like to take pictures of dogs because dogs are sympathetic creatures
They are everywhere and they have human characteristics
Its not the subject, its how you treat the subject
Thomas Dworzak
…the project about homeland. Iran, Georgia and Bavaria.
The original idea was to travel to Bavaria and to take 15 images of my lost homeland or my former homeland or the land that is not quite my home anymore but still my home made me feel a little bit strange so I said I would work on 5 images of Georgia, 5 images of Tehran and 5 images of Bavaria
Strangely enough, I now live in Paris and I lived in NY for a long time and it never even occurred to me to call these places home
In my eyes these were kind of practical places and I think they fit the frequently used expression based in Paris or based in NY
However claiming that Georgia is my home also sounds wrong or to give that honour to Tehran only - which is my wife’s homeland - and a place where I have spent time at regular intervals for many years and where I’ve also found a new family
If I have a sense of home in any place, it exists in these three locations
What I’ve become more accurately aware of is my immediate family environment or lets call them the two most important or closest individuals -my wife and my father - they all have such a sense of home, but home is an issue for them
My father is a refugee and my wife was a refugee and she subsequently returned to Tehran - in other words, they had to deal with that
In Bavaria the issue was that I thought I’d just travel to Moravia with my father, visit the village he had to escape from in 1946 and that was the next aspect
In Tehran I photographed my wife’s school when she returned. It was similar to a re-integration school where they taught people who had left. Iranian customs and manners.
I think the project has actually made it clearer to me that I do have a home in Georgia, in Tehran but also still in Bavaria because of my family
But I also more aware of the fact that the place where I live right now does not necessarily have to be home
Chien-Chi Chang
Chinatown if the perfect fit for me to pursue the Home project
Because over the last 25 years I have been photographing chinatown
People I photograph there…just stay in touch with these like 20 families
I have given a lot to Chinatown but I have also received a lot through Chinatown
America is a country made all of immigrants. were kind of in-between homes
They must be thinking their home back in China, also trying to make a new home here
And you’ll see a lot of people like that in Chinatown.
In Chinatown you see visitors, tourists everywhere
But what I think is really difficult I think is to go behind the door
Its not a secret, but it’s just difficult to get in
Its still home
Jonas Bendiksen
I started photographing when I was 14, 15 years old, when I was a teenager.
I discovered my Dads rarely used SLR in the closet at home and I started fiddling with it and found it interesting and started photographing ‘Home’, my life at home.
I was fascinated by it and started doing it more and more
I live on Nesodden which is a peninsula outside of Oslo about 20 mins out in the Oslofjord
When I think of Home, I think of where my family is, where my wife and children are
When I’m travelling I think of home, its them that Im thinking about
Of course, this place is my home. Big warm feelings for this place
But if you were to distill it down, it’s where my family is
Here in the project, I’ve been simply photographing my family
My plan the whole time was when Billy shows up when she is born then I’d take the time off and be at home and also photograph this time
Olivia Arthur
So when the Home project came to me, I was already 6 months pregnant with my second child but in terms of presenting it as a project to the outside world, I think what’s interesting is this period of waiting
You know, thats where it all becomes so very personal
Its physically this incredible transformation
Home, so actually I’ve been pretty transient as a photographer but also growing up as well
My family lived all over the world and we didn’t have like one childhood family home
In a way thats just kind of been a continuation
Home for me is much more about people, about family
Growing up it was about my family and my siblings
Now its about my kids, my husband and our family
So home is not really about a house or a building for me at all
its really about the people I am closest to
Antoine d’Agata
I took this order, around the theme Home, literally. I went back to where I was born, to where I grew up, a universe that’s more comfortable.
A big city with closed characterless neighbourhoods
I tried to figure out why I ran away, what made me leave, why I had to leave.
It was a violent come-back. It was the first time I photographed these urban areas, these streets, these alignments of restricted, closed houses, where there’s not much space to live, to feel, to exist anymore.
a fragile trace of things
I needed to take time to look, to take time to feel and examine
It’s all about questioning everything
It is hard enough for me to live up to my own questioning , my own challenges
Notes from David Gentleman book London, you're beautiful
“Drawing anything makes you look at it harder and more intently, whether it’s a leaf, a building or a person; even if it’s a whole city, though then it takes longer and the whole dawns on you only gradually, as I hope it does in the following pages. Revisiting places I already knew well and exploring others I knew slightly or not at all has changed my understanding and appreciation of the city, and also challenged my ways of drawing. I have lived in the same street for fifty-six years–the same house for forty–yet I still feel I am just getting to know it. ”
— London, You're Beautiful: An Artist's Year by David Gentleman
“I take a small camera as a notebook or aide-memoire to remind me of possible future subjects or of things I would otherwise instantly forget, like what people are wearing or a fleeting light effect or a detail of a building. It also saves me from wasting time sketching what later turn out to be the wrong subjects. But a camera can itself turn into a time-wasting distraction, a way of putting off the task of committing oneself to a subject and starting to draw it. If time’s not a factor, it’s better just to draw. Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things–landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people– that would otherwise have melted from my memory. ”
— London, You're Beautiful: An Artist's Year by David Gentleman
“Throughout, it is a personal rather than comprehensive view.”
— London, You're Beautiful: An Artist's Year by David Gentleman
Typed ‘Define what home means’ into AI generator ChatGPT
ChatGPT response
Home can be defined as a place where an individual or a group of people live and reside. However, its meaning goes beyond just being a physical location; it holds a deep emotional and psychological significance. Home is often associated with feelings of belonging, comfort, security, and familiarity. It is a space where people can be themselves, relax, and feel a sense of safety.
The concept of home varies from person to person and can encompass different aspects, such as:
Residence: At its core, home refers to the physical dwelling where people live, whether it's a house, apartment, or any other type of accommodation.
Family and Relationships: Home is a place where families and loved ones come together, fostering strong bonds and shared experiences. It's where people create memories, share their joys and sorrows, and support one another.
Personal Identity: Home is often tied to a sense of identity and belonging. It's where individuals grow, develop, and establish a sense of self. The cultural, social, and emotional connections associated with one's home can contribute significantly to their identity.
Security and Safety: Home provides a safe haven, a place where individuals can feel protected from external threats and dangers. It's a space where people can let their guard down and find comfort in knowing they are sheltered from harm.
Comfort and Relaxation: Home is a sanctuary where individuals can unwind and recharge. It's a space where they can escape the stresses of the outside world and find peace and tranquility.
Ownership and Personalization: For many, the ability to own or personalize their home allows them to create a space that reflects their tastes, values, and personality.
Community and Belonging: Home extends beyond the walls of the physical dwelling to encompass the neighborhood and community surrounding it. Feeling a sense of belonging to one's community is an essential part of feeling at home.
Overall, home is a multidimensional concept that encompasses not only the physical structure in which people live but also the emotional connections and sense of belonging they experience within that space. It is a place of love, acceptance, and shared experiences, making it a central aspect of human life and well-being.
Genuinely surprised how accurate it seems to be based on others responses I have found.