From the very beginning after hearing and analysing the brief I was interested in working with portraiture. For every project for the last couple of months I did not get a chance to do a project focusing my interests on portraiture and I though this was a good idea to develop my skills within that genre. After researching a few artists and doing quick mood boards I wanted to create something that would send a strong message to the viewer, as our theme was based on waste I knew that any images that I would take would be quite shocking because they would be around that theme and seeing exhibitions and magazine photos presenting rubbish and waste in general would not be normal. People get a different opinion about what they see everyday and what they see the first time, some can love it some will hate it. I decided to find a big space, something like a wasteland for my first photoshoot. After finding a model who seemed ideal for the shoot I had to make sure that they have the right look and objects to work with. From the beginning I knew I did not want to work with the everyday waste like food or packaging so I decided to go with something more certain like mechanical and toxic waste. My father is a mechanic so it was not hard to find many mechanical waste, I also went around some small alley behind houses as well as industrial roads to try to find more objects that I could work with and that is where I found many tyres.
After the shoot and the editing I sought some second opinion about my selection of outcomes and came to a conclusion that the images are very similar to each other but also the message I am trying to send is not exactly there. My images looked like just stylised portraits and that was not what I wanted. This time I decided to really spend a lot more time to find the ideal place for my shoot and maybe change the model. This time I also used a 100mm lens as I wanted to completely lose the background behind my model, I wanted to make my model come out of the image with the background as out of focus as I possibly could. To find a perfect place to shoot I went around the industrial areas, fields, lakes and forts but actually I found just what I wanted on a field on the side of a road in the industrial area. The area was full of sand, grass and chalk, there was a lot of rubbish dumped on the side including things all the way from tyres to fridges.
After finding the place I needed I had to get my model ready for the shoot, I decided to wrap them around with cables and tyres and almost making them look like they are becoming a part of it. There was many different compositions that I tried out still using the 100mm lens which worked really well and created just what I wanted in the background. When I finished the shoot I edited my pictures which came out very well but I then when I stood back and viewed my images like any other viewer would I knew this what still not what I wanted. All my images still looked very similar to each other and even though I think that the compositions worked really well I still did not see the message that I wanted to send, it was almost like there was too much of the person in there and not enough of the waste that I am basing my shoot on. After all that I did a lot of research on surrealism, suffocation and unusual portraits which gave me many more ideas to what I can do with the objects I have. I then decided to go back to the same place which I thought it worked perfectly and took the same model as they was also great. This time I worked really carefully throughout every shot and thought in depth about the compositions I was making and that seemed to be spot on. After editing the images and getting second opinions this final shoot went very well.
National Geographic Magazine was the type of presenting my work that I though about from the beginning of the project, I had some doubts about it and sometimes thought that maybe exhibition would be better or the Guardian magazine but in the end I decided to stick with what I was going towards from the beginning. From the start I played around with different covers and magazine spreads to try to get better at doing each one and the ones I got for my final ones worked really well and now I am proud that I did stay with the National Geographic even thought it might not exactly be a thing they would publish but I tried to give myself a chance which seemed to work.
Martyna Jurczyszyn 