For this photoshoot, I was inspired by David Hockney and his ‘joiners’ series. I began by taking photographs of the primary school Plat Douet as this is where they both went to and is what ultimately led them to meeting and becoming friends. I also decided to take photographs of both of their rooms as I believe their contrasting rooms give an insight into who they are as people and their different interests. I then imported these images into Lightroom and adjusted the exposure, contrast, whites, blacks and shadows accordingly. Next, I opened up my adjusted images in photoshop and selected the rectangular marquee tool and began creating boxes on my image. To create these boxes, I right clicked on them and pressed layer via copy then I added a drop shadow to the box by right clicking on the layer and pressing blending options and selecting drop shadow. I then repeated this step multiple times (making sure to go on the background layer each time I wanted to create a new box) until I had a shape that resembled the work of David Hockney. Finally, I added a new layer behind all of my boxes and got rid of the original image and filled in the new layer with various different colours.

Final Images:

Plat Douet:

Their bedrooms:

Overall, I believe this photoshoot where I photographed my friends’ rooms and their primary school to explore their different personalities through room layouts, was an insightful and creative attempt in portraying their personal identities. The concept of using their environment (their room) as a way to delve into who they are and their interests as individuals was creative and effective in my opinion. The contrast between their childhood space (Plat Douet) and their adult environments (their rooms) was an effective way of showcasing their personality changes and growth over time. I believe their rooms act as a portrait themselves as by looking at the various objects, colours and layouts in their room, you can begin to understand who they are.

I think I managed to successfully recreate the work of David Hockney’s ‘Joiners’ series quite closely. As in his work, he used lots of polaroid pictures he had taken of a specific thing from multiple perspectives and then joined them to make a composite image. Similarly to his work, I created this fragmented effect on photoshop by adding boxes to my image then moving them slightly to give that not perfectly lined up look. However, if I were to improve this idea, I would make the image more fragmented and emphasise the concept of time passing within the same image by photographing their room at different times in the day as this is what he typically did. This would make my work align more closely with David Hockney’s and allow me to explore their room from more than one perspective.