For Project Brief 3, we are going to produce a photo-essay of ten to fourteen photographs and the subject is going to be “stranger”. When I first heard about the task, I was kind of excited rather than afraid because I have photographed “strangers” for my pb2 in the past few weeks. Therefore, as I had an experience earlier, I don’t think it is going to a big challenge for me.

In the Tuesday class, we watched a documentary film of the photographer Vivian Maier. I have known about her before watching the documentary and I really love the way how she captured the street scene in her own style. Maier was working as a nanny for about forty years at the same time she was a street photographer who taking photos during her spare time. During her lifetime, Maier kept her photographs as secret where they were unknown and unpublished. In October 2009, after Maier passed away, her photographers were uploaded onto the internet by John Maloof and that was the time her work became famous.

Here are some of my favourite pieces:

Maier’s photographs were kind of random but at the same time you could feel the emotion and the story behind the image. In the documentary, some interviewees said that she was secretive and had no desire for publicity, some said that she had a mental illness. However, I think we should look at the Art itself instead of looking into her personal life. Besides her life, I really love the Art behind each one of Maier’s photographs.

On Friday, we had an exercise where we were asked to photograph 16 strangers on the street with two shots maximum for each portraits. Working as a group, we encountered many rejections at first. After a while we found a way to pick people who looks friendly and willing to be photographed, eventually we managed to photograph 16 sets of shots each in an hour.

In the result, I don’t think the photographs have the great quality in terms of composition and the colour because I was photographing through my phone and we were kind of rushing as we only had an hour to finish the task. However, it was a great experience for us to understand how to approach to strangers and being ethical in photographing.