Original? Please.

I had another epiphany today when thinking about the title 'I, Me, Mine'. I was thinking about belongings and what actually belonged to me, and no one else?

It dawned on me that nothing is actually ours forever - it can all be taken away from us:

Our health
Our appearance
Our possessions
Our loved ones

These are all things that I had originally thought were mine. But no. The only things that are truly mine and mine alone and can never be anyone else's, are my soul (if you believe in that sort of thing), and my past.

When I think of my past, I immediately think of my childhood (because I'm not really even past that stage of life yet) and how much it was influenced by my parents; their relationships, their ideas, their aspirations and, in the end, their divorce. I was hauled around from continent to continent, country to country, house to house, depending on where they wanted to go next. My stability was my family, and now even that's been taken away.

So now, whenever I see my little brothers' toys strewn around the garden, or their baby photos hanging on the walls, I feel a gaping hole inside me. I feel like I have been robbed of something that is a basic right - the right to grow up slowly.

This is the outcome of my childhood idea:

The four pictures above were taken in the (attempted) style of Sophie Calle (see research in sketchbook or short photo and explanation below). Now, personally I hate using ideas or techniques from other artists or photographers and I really don't like that the GCSE curriculum encourages you to do that. That being said, however, Sophie Calle's work is a bit too scandalous not to get caught up in.

...Kind of trying to be like this with the harsh light (taken with flash) as I think that a harsh light makes you concentrate on the things in the photograph more, making the objects seem so much more flawed and the situation more chaotic or, in my case, decrepit and my so-called 'childhood' hasn't been thought about in a long, long time, and has broken with abandonment and disuse.

These next two photos aren't really in the style of anyone... I just love the innocence on my brother's face in the first one; I think that extreme close-ups should only really be done frequently on innocent faces. It's hard to get a bad photo when all of his emotions are on the surface, almost touchable. He's not hiding anything. Except maybe a few Haribo.

I think that these photos are nice together because, while they're both sweet (not shown in the dark with harsh lighting to make it seem disturbing), they both have a very small depth of field and both contrast nicely with each other as one is in monochrome whilst the other is very colourful. They both are quite child-like in the sense that they really don't have an ulterior meaning, they are just them, as they are, because a child doesn't see the point in being anyone else, much less know how to do it.

I always imagine a soul as like an inner flame - something moving, hot, seemingly alive but with no body or cells.

SO I photographed fire:

This one is probably my favourite of the bunch (and it's a close call)... I just love the textures in it, and the patterns in the wood. To me, it feels like a heart... It was the centre of the fire, and, without my camera, I would never have been able to see into it (it was too bright and too hot for me to get that close to it). I think it's beautiful, and that it's been made even more beautiful in the way that 1) most people ignore this sort of thing and 2) it's not something that you see every day. I love the contrasts of shadows in this picture and the way that the fire tricks you into thinking that it is out of focus, but the solid pieces of wood assure you that the photo really isn't out of focus at all.

My next idea, carrying on from this: 

I think, after this went quite well, I am going to try and put monochrome photos of faces (those of my family, friends and me) behind the photos of fire and then change the opacity of the fire pictures so that you can still see the faces behind. I thought that would be a good idea because instead of just being pictures of fire, like they are now, they will represent a soul more and it will have more relation to 'I, Me, Mine'.