MTV/Young
Refugees Photo Project
Course programme
Session
1 – 17th Feb - Pictures of People
- Warm up exercise with polaroids
- Learn how to use an SLR and the lighting equipment
- Look at examples of pictures of people – what is a portrait? How can
lighting, composition etc be used to alter your impression of the person in
the picture? Portraits don’t have to show faces – what kinds of
details might you focus on instead? (hands, hair braids, jewellery, shoes,
logo on clothing, way of standing or sitting, back of head, part of face e.g.
eyes)
- Take portraits of each other without showing faces (unless you want to!)
- Volunteers to produce prints and contact sheets for session 2.
Session
2 – 24th Feb - Building up the picture
- Evaluation of images from last week. What worked and what didn't?
- Using selected images from last week, plus newspaper/magazine pictures
and text snippets etc make joiners and collages.
- Make changes to the negatives from week 1 (scratching, bleaching, etc)
so that new prints can be made from them.
- Volunteers to produce new prints from the altered negs in time for next
session.
Session 3 – 2nd March - Street Portraits
- Look again at examples of portraits, exploring how they can reveal/conceal
identity
- Discuss approaches to taking pictures of strangers. Candid or posed; consent;
the subject decides or the photographer does?
- Go out in small groups (each group accompanied by a volunteer) and take
pictures of people on the street that you think look like ‘typical
Brixton people’. Consider what we have talked about when deciding how
to represent them.
February 2004
