Still searching for the elephant

I was doing a lot of thinking over the weekend to find a suitable project for the elephant project: a project that combines an interesting topic (i.e. for me) with the learning experience that I am looking for (to hone and push further my visual aesthetics).

I ended up looking into autism. This is a topic that interests me a lot but which I have dismissed as doing for my main project for various reasons. I found out so far that there is a school for autistic children in the Elephant area (Tim Jewel Unit for Children with Autism) and a privately run play club for autistic children. The main task will now be to get access and get a family interested that is affected by autism to work with me for a few weeks. Not an easy talks given the sensitivity in this country about photographing children. But I will try to get access.

I was also looking at Eugene Richards’ work on autism over the weekend (which is on the VII website). It is almost intimidating how masterly Richards has done this project. I just love his work! I love the way he has approached the subject, his visual aesthetics he has used (he has also shot the project in colour, which I like a lot) and the sensitivity and empathy for his subjects that emanates from his images. He is just remarkable and one of the greatest photojournalist of all time for me.

I had some other, more wacky ideas for the elephant project as well. For example, one could install a pinhole camera with an ultra long exposure time (say weeks or months) on the top of the media block at the school and get images that truly document the long-term changes in the Elephant area.

Or one could define the ‘street’ as the ultimate community of the Elephant area and do a project on street photography. I noticed for example that on Friday afternoon the whole area was engulfed in beautiful light.

One other idea I had was to collect photographs from residents of the Heygate Estate and use these photographs to speak for the community instead of taking images ourselves. That way one could also tie in the Heygate community into our project which on a meta level reinforces the ‘community’ idea.