TOPIC 2

​Considering archives of photos within my family, there are very little photographs in which my family possess, perhaps through that lack of privilege and accessibility to cameras. With my family predominantly relating to a working-class environment, cameras and photographers were often luxury. However, with the small archive of photographs the family own, I have found they capture the social environment of the time, starting with my grandparents wedding photo, fig 1, my granddad was serving in the army from a young age, and for me the lack of photographs they have together in these years of young adolescents is a reflection on the social parameters of working class lif, with money preventing the accessibility of photography for them. As I look through the photographs there is an emergence of social matters, with the photos revealing their lives in the 1980s/1990s, fig 2 and 3. Even through these photos were taken as a snapshot of family moments, we begin to see the impact of wider society from the clothes, decor and even attitude of the time. These snapshots hold a larger archival power in epitomising social changes and the identity of the working class. With my family predominately living in Grimsby, there is a definite correlation between how the town's industrial decline has impacted the environment surrounding families, fig 4 and 5. Furthermore, the identity contained within this archive is pivotal to the understanding of the images we take today, now with there being social change within my immediate family moving into a more comfortable bracket of living, when reflecting on photographs from 20 years ago there is still some overlay or resemblance between the identity of where I started and to where I am now. 

Considering my projects previous, the project 'Janette Brown', fig 6 and 7, archival pictures where paramount to the narrative. With the project's being deep rooted in the ideas of  memory due to Janette having dementia, the archival work epitomised the woman she was not the woman she became. With my current project, I am keen again to work with archival photography, as societal pressures have always been present, I am hoping to demonstrate this and challenge these conventions, thus I want to reflect on the origins of deep rooted ideological values with people and how this translates into modern day. Perhaps when communicating with the elder generation, bringing these past images to evoke the emotions encourages the connections to past or to even consider these photos to be apart of the collection.