Ideas for my Final Project

After I did a bit of researching, I began to think of ideas for my final project that will be due in at the end of the year. Because I love Jill Greenberg's photos of crying children, I am interested in taking photos of children myself. I know that this could be challenging, but if done right I think my phots could be quite beautiful.

Firstly I started to think of children I knew that I could ask to be photographed. I have:
- Aaliya who is just 2 months old
- Sisters Aerika (5) and Taylah (7)
- Suzannah (10)
- Sara (14)

I like the fact that these children (and teenager) are all at staggered ages, so if I chose to photograph all of them I could use my photographs to kind of tell a story ofver the years. However I will have to ask their permission, and their parents permission before I settle on who will be on my final list.

The idea that I have come up with could be a bit controversial, which I will need to describe to the parents of my models. I would like to focus on the theme of children, more importantly girls, growing up too fast these days. It makes me sick to see ten year olds wearing makeup and getting piercings, or 13 year olds having their first child. To put across this message I would like to photograph girls being subjected to certain situations, however do it in post-production so I am not being the cause of such destruction. For example, I would like to photograph the 5 year old reading a book that is titled something like, "Dressing for your body type." I would give her a book with a blank cover for the photograph, and manipulate it later on to include the title. I think this theme could work really well with the lighting effects that I have seen in some of my research, such as the lighting that Jill Greenberg uses. This idea would involve taking photos in the studio with props or photographing individual environments to bring in afterwards.

I have not yet thought of the different scenarios that I would like to play my models in, but this will develop over the course of this year as I learn more about photographic techniques.