Refugee Blues
With the European migrant crisis being topical lately, and having seen one too many people becoming senselessly angered at migrants coming to their countries as opposed to living in a warzone, I decided to produce a photo shoot based around the idea of refugees packed into a small boat facing perilous conditions; a thing that many anti-refugee people in Europe and the UK neglect to consider. I purchased a small model fishing boat and 100 small plastic people for use in model train sets, and proceeded to create my own overcrowded, ill-equipped migrant boat. I could not capture the sheer amount of people crammed onto real migrant boats in my work, because sticking the figures down was far too fiddly, but I instead created several 'moments,' things happening on the boat which were often representative of the crisis as a whole. I named this photo shoot after the famous poem of the same name by WH Auden, which is one of my favourite poems. I quite liked that the plastic figurines were faceless, as this made the images slightly eerie, and could also be representative of the way many people view refugees, seeing them all as the same.
I liked the sense of movement the left man's pose gave to the image, and how clear the splashes of 'rain' looked. The dynamic movement of the man's arm also lends the image a sense of urgency and danger, as if he is pointing at a storm in the distance. I recoloured the sky in the background to make the storm-like setting seem more convincing.
I set out to capture several 'moments' with this shoot representative of the final product. A father comforting his terrified daughter seemed appropriately emotive. This image was created using two figurines, one beign a girl standing upright and one being a man with his arm outwards as if leaning on something, repurposed into an embrace. I would have rather captured this moment from the front but I found the backdrop bowl's angle to be restrictive.
I liked the sense of movement the left man's pose gave to the image, and how clear the splashes of 'rain' looked. The dynamic movement of the man's arm also lends the image a sense of urgency and danger, as if he is pointing at a storm in the distance. I recoloured the sky in the background to make the storm-like setting seem more convincing.
I felt like this shoot had merit, although my setup options were limited and as such, so were my angles from which to shoot. This seriously limited the number of different shots I could take. Like with my 'Blackfish' images I used a blue bowl as a coloured backdrop, and set the boat atop a china bowl turned upside down, iinside a separate plastic bowl. To create the effect of rain lashing down on the boat, I used a small spray bottle and set my camera to a timed shutter release. The images then had to be colour corrected.