Siân Davey

Siân Davey (b. 1964) is a UK based documentary and editorial photographer. A large part of her work is documenting her own family and community. One of these projects is "Looking for Alice", a story of her daughter who has Down's Syndrome. It is a story about society's relationship with what is considered "different" as well as the fear and uncertainty that initially made it difficult for Davey to love her daughter.

siandavey.com/humannature/

Davey describes her style as a dance between intuitive and intellectually formulated. "The thinking mind is often needed to inform a moment or help us through a process of inquiry. But equally, the thinking mind can stop us from seeing and responding to the unconscious material out there. It can close down the adventure and infinite possibilities of the unknown", Davey says. (Wolf, S. 2019. Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice. p.57.First edition. Aperture, USA.)

When creating Looking for Alice, Davey knew from the start she wanted to make a photo book about it. With sequencing, she was able to tell the story exactly how it should be told. She also reminds it is important to know when a body of work has come to an end - when the charge drops and you feel yourself losing the connection to the narrative, it is time to let go. (Wolf, 2019, p.58.)

Elinor Carucci

Elinor Carucci (b. 1971) is a New York based Israeli-American photographer. She is known as a fine art photographer although Carucci herself states she does not believe in genres. "Let's take, for example, the words fine art photography. I see art in many forms of photography, documentary photography, fashion photography, magazine photography. And many times I go to galleries to look at what I think will be art and recognize commercial ways of thinking, pieces being made in order to be used as decoration, in order to fit into trends that happen to be appreciated at the moment, in order to be sellable. I am making art. It is sometimes staged and sometimes a snapshot, sometimes conceptual and sometimes emotional, and sometimes, if I am lucky enough, both. Who cares. Fuck the genre." (Wolf, S. 2019. Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice. p.31. First edition. Aperture, USA.)

Diary of a Dancer (2005). Carucci was a professional belly dancer for fifteen years.

When asked which comes first for her, the idea for he project or individual photographs, Carucci replies both things are happening simultaneously. "I can have an idea for a project and then take individual pictures that will lead me to change the project." (Wolf, 2019, p. 30)

She also often takes photographs she thinks are going to be about one thing, but end up being about another thing entirely. The key is "listening" to the pictures and understanding what the project is about.

Sometimes the projects are also affected by when a certain body of work comes to an end. For example the series Diary of a Dancer ended in 2005 when Carucci fell pregnant and could no longer perform. However for Closer (2002) it took years to find a publisher which actually turned the project into a decade of photographing and according to Carucci, made the book even better.

I came up with a theme!

I was struggling to decide on a theme/title to tie all the photos in this project together. One day I was thinking about why I chose to take photos of myself pretending to be escaping through the window for the first shoot. I realized that might have something to do with the fact I sometimes fear that someone is going to break into the house (a murderer perhaps) and I'm going to have to jump out the second-floor window to run away from them. Totally irrational but anyway, that gave me the idea to do this project on my fears since I've got quite many! However, I want to keep the project light hearted despite the morbid subject. I will try to include some very specific and silly fears I have and see how it goes!

Trying out some ideas for the fear of my body decomposing after I die - how fun!