When I started my personal investigation, my main focus was to explore fashion in culture and fashion as a way to express individuality and this is what my final pieces will consist of. I believe that fashion is such a diverse concept that can be completely unique to a person and culture, it is something personal and I wanted to convey this in my final pieces.
Photo book:
My first final piece is a photo book, the aim of this photo book is to express my own culture and I can do this by contributing different aspects of the Vietnamese culture into the photographs such as the colour red which is an extremely important colour in the culture which represents happiness, love and celebrations. Since the theme of my personal investigation is both fashion and colour, I thought that having my focus on the colour red in this photo book will tie into my investigation and suit the aim of my photo book perfectly. The meaning behind creating this photo book was to make my investigation more personal to me as it is able to represent myself as a person and photographer.
The artist that I was inspired by to do this photo book was Kenneth Lam, specifically his work called 'White As Rice' which looked into the colour white in culture and what it represents, I wanted to explore the colours in my own culture which led to my decision on creating a photo book. I wanted to use the images that I took inspired by Kenneth Lam where I used the colour red as the main colour of the images, addition to that, I took more photos with the colour red because I felt that I didn't have en0ugh images for a photo book, the only difference with the first shoot is that I tried to incorporate more things that represent Vietnam such as its national flower and animal. Furthermore, I also took photographs from my cultural fashion shoot where I photographed my model with traditional vietnamese wear.
Originally, I wanted to make the photo book from scratch where I physically glue the printed images to a5 pieces of paper and then bind them by glue to create a book, however, after some experimenting of actually creating the book using this process, it didn't look as professional as I wanted it to. So I decided to experiment with other techniques that can be used to bind a book. In the end, I decided to create the book from the website: https://www.photobox.co.uk/ and bought it, so that I had a professionally-made book.
After closely inspecting Kenneth Lam's work, I noticed that he uses poems in his work as a side piece of his photographs and after looking at my own photo book, I felt that mine was too plain compared to his, therefore, I wanted to use poems that help to represent the Vietnamese culture. After some research, I found some poems that I thought represented the country well and I incorporated that into the photo book however, since the Vietnamese language used symbols on their words, photobox did not allow me to use letters with symbols, this meant that I had to adjust the poems so that it had no symbols which I personally did not like since it did not look like Vietnamese anymore, but I liked the idea of the poems so I kept it.
Photo book:
My first final piece is a photo book, the aim of this photo book is to express my own culture and I can do this by contributing different aspects of the Vietnamese culture into the photographs such as the colour red which is an extremely important colour in the culture which represents happiness, love and celebrations. Since the theme of my personal investigation is both fashion and colour, I thought that having my focus on the colour red in this photo book will tie into my investigation and suit the aim of my photo book perfectly. The meaning behind creating this photo book was to make my investigation more personal to me as it is able to represent myself as a person and photographer.
The artist that I was inspired by to do this photo book was Kenneth Lam, specifically his work called 'White As Rice' which looked into the colour white in culture and what it represents, I wanted to explore the colours in my own culture which led to my decision on creating a photo book. I wanted to use the images that I took inspired by Kenneth Lam where I used the colour red as the main colour of the images, addition to that, I took more photos with the colour red because I felt that I didn't have en0ugh images for a photo book, the only difference with the first shoot is that I tried to incorporate more things that represent Vietnam such as its national flower and animal. Furthermore, I also took photographs from my cultural fashion shoot where I photographed my model with traditional vietnamese wear.
Originally, I wanted to make the photo book from scratch where I physically glue the printed images to a5 pieces of paper and then bind them by glue to create a book, however, after some experimenting of actually creating the book using this process, it didn't look as professional as I wanted it to. So I decided to experiment with other techniques that can be used to bind a book. In the end, I decided to create the book from the website: https://www.photobox.co.uk/ and bought it, so that I had a professionally-made book.
After closely inspecting Kenneth Lam's work, I noticed that he uses poems in his work as a side piece of his photographs and after looking at my own photo book, I felt that mine was too plain compared to his, therefore, I wanted to use poems that help to represent the Vietnamese culture. After some research, I found some poems that I thought represented the country well and I incorporated that into the photo book however, since the Vietnamese language used symbols on their words, photobox did not allow me to use letters with symbols, this meant that I had to adjust the poems so that it had no symbols which I personally did not like since it did not look like Vietnamese anymore, but I liked the idea of the poems so I kept it.
I feel this final piece is very successful with what I was trying to achieve, especially with the addition of the traditional Vietnamese outfit. What I really like is that I added subtle hints to indicate the Vietnamese culture such as, the lotus flower, the flag and dragon, but it still looks like a normal fashion editorial. If I were able to improve this photo book, I might have gotten another model to help show the culture in a different perspective and I wanted the poems on Vietnamese, but I wasn't able to do this, the poems that I put in the photo book wasn't as effective in my opinion. Other than that I think the photo book was one of the most successful pieces.