It cannot go without mentioning that I’ve neglected my posting duties lately. It has been the last 2 weeks of my degree and I had a family bereavement and everything was just kind of crazy for a while. I handed in my last final pieces of work this week though so I now have all the time in the world to devote to this project.


I started collecting these films for one of my two final projects for my photography degree, which meant that I needed to produce some kind of final outcome, regardless of the fact that I’ll be carrying this on long after I graduate. To keep things simple(ish), I drew the line at the first 10 films, which was still 240 photographs. Which I needed to pull a final 12 images from.

I first broke it down into categories according to the most obvious themes that I could see when I looked at the images en masse. The categories I ended up with were: Human Presence (physical), Human Presence (lack of), Human Presence (suggested), Holiday, Celebration and Candid. There was obviously a lot of overlap between the groups but that was fine.

The category that I was most drawn to was Human Presence (lack of). I had noticed a while ago that there were certain photos that looked like they should have people in, as if they’d just gotten up and left, or were about to walk into the frame. The setting seemed ready, as if it were waiting for them to arrive. It seemed odd to me that people would take these kind of photographs. The presence of other people is usually a key ingredient in this kind of photo so these images suggest a kind of loneliness. It gives the impression that the photographer is entirely alone. If they had a companion, wouldn’t they have asked him/her to step into the frame?

With this in mind I selected the images that portrayed that feeling. There were 16 that fit the criteria and from those I chose my final 12, which were these:

I’d love to hear what you think about my selection process and the images I chose as my final 12. Like I said, this is by no means the end of the project, I have 2 fantastic black and white films ready to go in the next couple of days!