Assignment 1 – Theme and Meaning
After a lot of research into abandoned buildings around me and photographers on the subject and places to photograph, I have decided to go back to my theme of abandonment and plan to photograph places that are poorly looked after and are pushed away by society.
After a talk with Matt about this, he pointed out that there didn’t seem to be a clear, solid reason for me carrying out this project therefore, this made me think about what I really want to say with these images. I thought about abandonment within society and why places are abandoned. At first, I thought it was usually due to something happening in someones lives which forces them to abandon their homes, then I thought more about what it may be that forces someone to pack up and leave their homes. Most of the time, it would probably be money. I don’t think many people would willingly leave their home that they’ve spent so much on and not get anything back from it and leave it to rot.
As well as this, money would be the issue for businesses to abandon factories and their stores. Most of the time, people/businesses run out of money to fund the building and keep it up and running, therefore they are forced to leave it as they can’t afford to keep it going. As the country became poorer around 2008 and the economy fell, many places became abandoned as the owners couldn’t afford to keep them and no one else could afford to buy them, therefore they remained unsold and they were left to decay and weren’t given any attention. This made them even harder to sell and people end up giving up on ever returning them to a decent state.
In conclusion, the thing I want to focus on throughout my work is the economy we are in and how this affects the places around us. The places that once held so many memories, places that used to provide the public with goods and services, the places that people have built lives for themselves in. And how they have been destroyed and abandonded and forgotten about like they never even existed.
Oxford Dictionaries (2014) Define Economy [online] available from <http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/economy> [15 November 2014]
- Economy refers to “the state of a country or region in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services and the supply of money.”