Tami Aftab and Marie Smith, two people who use their photographs as an outlet of their emotions and thoughts through portraiture photography...
Tami Aftab's dog's in the car is a project documenting her father's medical condition which causes short term memory loss. Throughout the video instead of referring to her father in a formal way like "father" she refers to him as "dad", implying she has a good and close relationship with him. A lot of her early photos were inspired by her families use of post-it notes around the house which they used to help their father to remember to do things, one of these post-it notes said "dogs in the car" which was a reminder that there were dogs in their car, hence the name of the project "dogs in the car". Aftab began enlarging these post it notes and photographing them in public, sometimes with her father in the photo and sometimes not, this gave her a much more positive and lighthearted view on her father's condition, and throughout her project you can see the unconditional love and warmth in her and her fathers relatio nship in her photos. The fact that she managed to deal with her father's condition and make art out of it during quarantine is impressive, as it made it more difficult to find a way to keep a stable mental state. One of my favourite photos from this project is the photo of her father standing alone in a field facing away from the camera, simply because it is a beautiful photo and symbolizes her and her father's peace with his condition. Overall i find this project warming as Aftab managed to turned a bad thing into a good thing using photography.
Marie Smith started her own photography journey through self reflection and questioning the mental well being of herself and women of colour. She began taking self portraits in her back garden, using the leaves of plants to make her images more interesting, this quickly turned into the theme of her project, "the fog has lifted slightly", a project based off taking self portraits and writing about her feelings in a diary, she soon discovered that this was helping her mental health and decided to start a new project, "whispering for help" which was predominantly based on the mental health and problems of women of colour. She met up with these women before their photoshoots and talked about their issues. the photo-shoots were done in a collaborative way as the subject would get to choose which photos they liked and had no obligation to allow Smith to post them, the majority of the photos had a story which the subject write regarding their own mental health and problems which contributed to making the boring portraits more interesting. Marie also did extensive research on the topic of mental health throughout different social/economic groups and "was met with contradictory statistics" for example Chinese women having low rates of admission to mental health facilities and began to question the well being of Chinese women without counselling from the NHS. She also wanted to ensure other marginalized groups such as LGBT people were included.
Tami Aftab's dog's in the car is a project documenting her father's medical condition which causes short term memory loss. Throughout the video instead of referring to her father in a formal way like "father" she refers to him as "dad", implying she has a good and close relationship with him. A lot of her early photos were inspired by her families use of post-it notes around the house which they used to help their father to remember to do things, one of these post-it notes said "dogs in the car" which was a reminder that there were dogs in their car, hence the name of the project "dogs in the car". Aftab began enlarging these post it notes and photographing them in public, sometimes with her father in the photo and sometimes not, this gave her a much more positive and lighthearted view on her father's condition, and throughout her project you can see the unconditional love and warmth in her and her fathers relatio nship in her photos. The fact that she managed to deal with her father's condition and make art out of it during quarantine is impressive, as it made it more difficult to find a way to keep a stable mental state. One of my favourite photos from this project is the photo of her father standing alone in a field facing away from the camera, simply because it is a beautiful photo and symbolizes her and her father's peace with his condition. Overall i find this project warming as Aftab managed to turned a bad thing into a good thing using photography.
Marie Smith started her own photography journey through self reflection and questioning the mental well being of herself and women of colour. She began taking self portraits in her back garden, using the leaves of plants to make her images more interesting, this quickly turned into the theme of her project, "the fog has lifted slightly", a project based off taking self portraits and writing about her feelings in a diary, she soon discovered that this was helping her mental health and decided to start a new project, "whispering for help" which was predominantly based on the mental health and problems of women of colour. She met up with these women before their photoshoots and talked about their issues. the photo-shoots were done in a collaborative way as the subject would get to choose which photos they liked and had no obligation to allow Smith to post them, the majority of the photos had a story which the subject write regarding their own mental health and problems which contributed to making the boring portraits more interesting. Marie also did extensive research on the topic of mental health throughout different social/economic groups and "was met with contradictory statistics" for example Chinese women having low rates of admission to mental health facilities and began to question the well being of Chinese women without counselling from the NHS. She also wanted to ensure other marginalized groups such as LGBT people were included.