Human Relationships

I have been thinking a lot about how to find visually interesting situations that could show intimate moments in any kind of human relationship. It seemed quite easy at the beginning of this process to capture images that could tell a story in a simple way about how people interact with each others. So I started planning assignment 2 and carefully approached strangers dealing with private matters, but it proved harder that I thought. Getting access to private situations it is always easier if you know already someone inside, so I tried bride and groom at a friend´s wedding and dogs and workers at the dog house just around the corner of my place in Battersea, but I could not take any decent photo carrying a clear message about human relationships.
The first option that came straight into my mind was to take a series of simple portraits of some pensioners at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. People full of stories to talk about with visitors interested in them or at least willing to hear them. Impressive buildings and ironed uniforms and shiny medals all over the place, but difficult to catch any obvious emotional or psichological content in depth. I suppose it is about how they relate to each other, or rather how they cope with each other or even how they try to avoid each other, in the last years of their lives with very little contact to the world around them.
For the second option I spent the whole morning in a clasroom to see how shy adults students behave in front of a colourful old teacher and how a professional deals with the people he has to work with.
Finally the third option was about the way a traditional English mother lives in a secure family environment with her son and daughter on a Sunday afternoon. As a principle it is exhausting and not particulary easy to work with young kids, but there is always a potential reward because they constantly show their changing emotions.