Assignment 3: thoughts

I've been thinking about the next assignment for this module. My tutor said in a recent email that "soon you will have to start thinking carefully about what you photograph" (paraphrase). This has been playing on my mind a lot recently. We are also in the process of selling our home. Each week we spend a few hours tidying and depersonalizing our home to make it more appealing to potential buyers. This process has got me thinking about how we 'hide' behind the walls of our houses, and by opening our house up for strangers to walk through every week is a bit like opening up part of ourselves. I also wonder what people would make of us by what we have in our homes, and even simply by what our home presents like. At times of great change we often question ourselves,and I am also questioning what I am... We use many words to describe ourselves, but when out socially and someone asks me what I do I say I am a geophysicist. Why do I give my professional title? Why don't I say I'm a mum,  or a photographer, or a loving wife? We all have different labels for ourselves,and each label has a different perceived 'value' in society. Likewise, the car we drive (or don't), house we live in (or don't) all dictate how we are viewed by others. That is, we try to live up to expectations and ideals inhow we present ourselves to other, but does it really matter one iota? Is it because I'm not proud to be a mum or any of the other titles? No, because I think that it's the elements of my life outside by paid work that make me me, but I think that that is not what society thinks or expects. So we hide behind labels, like we hide our lives behind the walls of our houses. No one really knows what goes on behind closed doors in other peoples lives (fortunately I often think!), though this is being increasingly publicized as people live out their every minute online (something I'm guilty of too).

These above issues fascinate me so I've been thinking about how to formulate them into an effective photographic project. I came back to my 'house facade' project which I started recently. I thought that I don't know anything about the people in the houses, but that they probably share at least some of my personal values, attributes and descriptors that I would use about myself. So I'm going to title each image with a descriptor that I would use on myself, depending on how I feel about each house.