Research- 'HOMELESS' ♥

When looking over my ideas and images I have produced, I was most interested in the idea 'Homeless' which relates to how people live their lives on the streets and have to survive without a home. The images I have photographed show my own life and the things that appear in and around my home, so this particular idea of the homeless has a connection to these pictures but show the difference between what homeless people would live like and the things they value in life to the way I live my life and the things I value. I am going to focus on this idea but expand upon how I could express this in different images. As I am passionate about fashion photography, I am going to research different fashion photographers and hopefully find photographers who seem to share this aspect within their images and maybe express grungy, unkempt imagery to visually communicate the 'homeless' way of living.

USEFUL QUOTES

"Just imagine. You lose your job, and your home. You end up in a shelter or on the streets struggling to figure out how to get back into housing, or when and where your next meal might be. You take hand-me-down clothing from the local church or homeless agency, desperately trying to find something that matches.
Then some highfalutin, out-of-touch designer wants to highlight your looks like you're some high society caricature. It's a form of circuitous degradation at its worst."

http://homelessness.change.org/blog/view/how_is_homelessness_high_fashion

Some people could argue why are these particular issues being brought to our attention in fashion photography. Christina Rivera argues:

"Why are real issue being glamorized? Yes the attention needs to be brought on the issue of homelessness but not in the form of designer clothes and makeup. Wow, what a way to profit from the despair of another. This economic down turn is depleting what many have worked hard for and the result is homelessness. Vogue magazine do something to help and not just your pocket!"

http://www.modelinia.com/blog/sasha-channels-her-best-cosette-for-vogue-italia/11441

CORRINE DAY

I particularly thought of Corrine Day for this style of imagery. Her grungy approach to snap shot fashion photography is the type of work I am interested in for my chosen topic, 'Homeless'. I think her work portrays this element of quite normal everyday aspects and really depicts the real life situations people cope with. She has used Kate Moss as a model for most of her images displaying her quite natural moving away from the typical beauty in fashion photography. Corrine Day wanted to challenge the way we understood beauty to be and in this case tried to show models appearing more normal and ordinary concerning these everyday aspects so the viewer could really engage with them more personally. As she takes focus off the clothing and moves it towards the characters of these people within her images, we start to understand how these people live their lives and we begin to get to know these people from their personalities expressed within the photographs. Corrine Day has a massive connection to the idea I am following for this assignment titled 'Home', I think her photography work will be quite useful for this brief and I am generally influenced by the snapshot lifestyle approach to her photographs. I may consider this aspect when thinking about shooting my ideas and think about the different backdrops Corrine Day uses within her work and maybe use similar scenes for photographing my own work. If I were to produce images in similar locations, I may focus on shooting areas that are quite scruffy and lifeless to relate to my theme 'Homeless'.

Corinne Day, Tara Wales, 1997

Corrine Day had a close relationship with Tara from being in a rock band called Pusherman. Her photographs of Tara expressed the use of drugs and having a good time but obviously for the wrong reasons. She documented the life of Tara and how she looked in different situations which were always rough and quite sad in a way. Her images portray the reality of the model and tried to connect to her in such a way that Tara felt comfortable showing this through her work. I like the way that even though they seem to show this scruffy and down side way of living, they still have a sense of beauty within them.

Tara sitting in her garden Stoke Newington 1999

Georgina, Brixton, 1995

These last two images are showing the models posed in very similar ways. These images are purposely set in locations that are grungy and scruffy to show how fashion can be unkempt and still look good. The clothing on the models are the main focal point of the photographs and I am particularly fond of the image below as it has a glamorous approach and visually interests me from the way she is posed to the texture of the dress. It works well as a concept whereas the above image tends to focus on the lighting as well as the fashion. This is important with fashion photography because you need the right lighting to make the image look presentable and work well with the style of the photograph. If the lighting wasn't portrayed effectively, the garments wouldn't deliver and the image would just look boring.

Untitled- Corrine Day

http://lu-yi.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html

http://iamfashion.blogspot.com/2006/04/15-by-corrine-day-featuring-kate-moss.html

http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/photographerframe.php?photographerid=ph016

Homeless Chic

This Fashion catwalk is displaying the appearance of how homeless people are expected to look. By designing this crazy homeless Chic style clothing, it really makes you think about the way people live today and the styles of clothing that is totally diverse to what people wear on an every day basis. Here is some information I collected off the website, http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/mareikesglasses/2009/10/24/jesus-style-and-homeless-chic/, I think some people would love this project or some people would hate it, I have a quote stated below of someone arguing the fact that this isn't a correct way to fashion and this shouldn't be allowed as it's singling people out who are homeless and it isn't actually their fault their living this way. My ideas wouldn't be to discriminate the homeless but to show how the positive side to being homeless.

"The German designer Patrick Mohr even included homeless people in his runway show when he presented his spring/summer 2010 summer collection at Berlin Fashion Week in July. They didn’t receive any money for the job but they could keep the clothes.
I think this is really tasteless and politically incorrect. OK, fashion has never been a business that is known for political correctness but isn’t that a little bit too much? This “I don’t care” style is really cool since it looks so real, unpolished and human but the homeless association is discriminating."

http://brittaaa.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html

- Looking more at the location based images that represent the style of homeless fashion. Studying the layout of different homeless style images, it will help me to further my ideas in terms of structuring my own shoots and exploring different locations.

Chic Heroin
http://www.chicheroin.blogspot.com/

I was personally inspired by this site... The reason I have focused and explored this type of work is because this style of clothing and appearance is very grungy and scruffy looking and when I think of the word homeless, this type of imagery comes to my head. Corrine Day's work is more about personal issues and situations within peoples lives who she photographs whereas this work is a documentation of this girl Elizabeth Victoria C. She is the actual models within the photographs and she has displayed pictures from the different moments in her life where this style of fashion is concerned. I wouldn't say this relates to homeless from the money side of things but the general appearance of this look has a significance to the homeless. When studying her blog, I looked at her interests page and this basically sums up the reason I have specifically chosen to look at her work...

"About Me
i love vintage t-shirts, french vogue, Polaroids, coffee, thin, yoga, travelling, electro, cupcakes, Keith Richards, high shoes, hippies, paleness, films, vinyl pants, leopard print and dirty hair."- This is summarising this hippy, funky, messy look which is what I can relate to the homeless by in a way without discriminating homeless people at all!

Here are some photographs that I thought would be useful for my project so I can see the overall structure and layout of these images...

These next images below move away from the natural lifestyle approach to the chic heroin photographs and focuses more on the grungy unkempt style of fashion. These locations are typically associated with the appearance of her fashion so it visually works and communicates the intended meaning. Whereas Corrine Day is specific to documenting the reality of the issues in peoples lives, this work is more about the fashion itself and even though the locations portray this sense of homelessness, the photographs are dominant to the clothing.