Further to my reading about The Young Foundation’s Bench Project I have decided to use them as a client for my assignment. On the blog about the bench project their latest post is celebrating the fact that they have been given ‘follow-on funding’ to develop their findings. Whilst they will be concentrating on inclusion and wellbeing in open spaces, particularly with refugees in mind, I thought I could use my artistic licence to suggest they wish to concentrate instead on the use of benches in smaller and more rural areas. Without a doubt the findings of their original project are still valid in country towns, though on a much smaller scale, and the availability of somewhere free and in the middle of things to sit is just as important.
I would say that whilst the general area in which I live is a fairly well-off place, the town itself and the surrounding estates have a high number of people who are lower income earners or unemployed and there are a large number of elderly people. The benches here enable older people to shop for themselves and take a rest if they tire, they give parents somewhere to stop with hungry or tired children for a snack during a shopping trip, they give people with no better place to go a place to be.
With this in mind, the brief for my assignment is as follows;
We require 8-12 images of members of the public using benches in one or two rural towns to contrast and compare with those taken in London which we have already used in our Bench Project. The images must show a variety of people using benches, they can be alone or in groups but we would like them to have an organic ‘street photography’ feel about them.
We require the images to be monochrome and not over processed. We will own all rights to use the images as we choose within our project, cropping them if necessary. This includes our website, printed reports and any other related publications.
References:
Rebecca's OCA Learning Log 