Whilst going through most of Jake’s nan things, I found so many documents regarding health and hospital appointments, her whole life revolves around her medication. The files I decided to scan in were the first few that she received, when she was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s 11 years ago, she has received many many more since this time. I have crossed out her address on them as Jake’s nan spends a lot of time making sure it is not visible when putting letters or anything with her address on it out for recycling as she is worried about people knowing where she lives.
After Word
On December 1st, 2017, Jake and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary. Jake had come over from France to see me, and so I travelled to Bristol, and we both stayed at his grandmother’s for the weekend. I automatically clicked with his nan as I have always got on very well with ‘older people’. It wasn’t until the summer of 2019 that I started to get to know her a lot better. During that summer, my mental health plummeted to an all-time low, I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety and later on in that year with Fibromyalgia.
During that summer, Jake would have to go to work, and so I spent a lot of time sitting and chatting with Jake’s nan. We got to know each other very well; I had never adequately spoken to anyone about any of my childhood issues or my mental health until then. She calls herself ‘The Agony Aunt’ as people have always seemed to come to her with their problems. She helped me throughout this summer, and I think I helped her too, to feel less lonely.
In April 2009, Jake’s nan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, which turned her whole life upside down. She gradually went from quite an active and busy lady to someone who now can hardly get out of her chair and struggles to do anything for herself. She finds it very difficult to find purpose, and so she does little things such as feeding the foxes and colouring to help her.
Within this photobook, I aim to show her life and how she was before I knew her compared to how she is now and how being burdened with a condition like hers can cause a dramatic decrease in quality of life; which for her, it 100% has. Her daily activities consist of the same thing day in and day out; she does small things like sorting out the recycling. She will make sure to cross out her address on every letter she can, she watches Bargain hunt every day and speaks to her two children, one who lives around 20 minutes away and the other who lives in France. She is very fed up with her life as every day consists of unbearable pains and the frustration of not being able to look after herself gets her exceptionally down.
Looking at photographs of her when she was younger was so exciting but so sad to look at as I don’t know the person who is in them, that person is entirely different to the version of her that I know, it’s almost like looking at a completely different woman.
I wanted to create this book for her, to help her feel purpose and meaning and to help her feel important. I wanted to make something that would help remind her of the amazing life that she had. Help her to remember that even though she is unable to be the person she once was, she can still look back on those memories and enjoy them for they are what makes her a wonderful lady and what makes her the person that I know and appreciate today.
Jake's Nans book
Here I have scanned in all the pages of Jake’s nan’s book so far, for a little bit of extra context, I will be taking out extracts and using the text next to images. I am not quite sure whether I will use text next to every image or just some as of yet but I am sure that will come to me when I start putting the book together.
I am in a dilemma as to whether I should keep the text in her handwriting, or whether to type the text up as I am worried people may not be able to read it even though it is very neatly written.
Celine Marchbank
We had the incredible pleasure of having Celine Marchbank come to the university in my first year where she gave us a fantastic talk about her book Tulip and her oncoming book A Stranger in my Mother kitchen. Her speech was so inspiring I think about it all of the time, even now, a year and a half after the event. When I wrote a blog post about her talk, I mentioned that I was highly inspired to create a project about my nan, which I still am, however at the moment as I am creating a photographic project about Jake’s nan.
Her book Tulip is about her mother who was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer which was confirmed to be terminal after them trying a million and one different treatments and trials.
Marchbank documented her mother’s unique characteristics in the most positive way that she could during these horrible times. Flowers were placed all over her mother's house. So Celine Marchbank used this as a way of showing symbolic meanings showing feelings such as love, happiness, generosity, decay and isolation.
She documented little things, such as her mother’s food or small aspects around the house beautifully and aesthetically, which shows her and her mother’s characters.
Tulip was displayed in so many articles such as the guardian and BBC News and shown on a lot of photography pages such as Shutterhub and the Royal Photographic Society. It must have been such a difficult task for her to photograph her mother knowing that she did not have long left with her, I can only imagine what she was going through during the process of the image taking.
Interestingly, before relooking at her book, I feel some of the images I have taken for my project resemble her images a fair amount, for example the image below of her medication box and showing her cat.
This just shows how much she inspired me, the fact that I managed to make images very similar to hers without even fully remembering the content in her book.
Not long after her mother sadly passed away, she created another project called ‘A Stranger in my Mothers kitchen’ where she was working learning how to say goodbye to the tried of losing her mother.
’I’m not quite sure what or whom this stranger is. Is it who she became through her illness? Is it the cancer that eventually killed her? Or is it me, left standing in my mother’s kitchen wondering what to do next? Perhaps it’s the grief, this crippling feeling I hadn’t had the pleasure to meet before, and wish I never had.’
Within this project, she documents her experience with the grief she encountered. Her mother had left lots of old recipes which Celine Marchbank taught herself how to cook to allow herself to feel closer to her mother again. she then decided to travel to America where her mother grew up, however, she did not feel the connection that she particularly wanted as the stories and photographs her mother would show and tell her were very different to the experience of visiting the same area now as times have moved on. I found this same issue with Jake’s nan, obviously not to the same extent as she is still with us, but when she tells me stories about her childhood and the area she grew up in, and I went to visit it to get a better understanding of her life before I knew her, it was so different to what she had explained to me as times have moved on so there were a lot of modern shops and everything had changed.
I feel my project about Jake’s nan is going to be quite similar to Celine Marchbanks project on her mother except for the obvious that Jake’s nan is still with us and I am looking into her childhood and her current life situations in one project instead of 2. Marchbank has been an incredible inspiration to this project and has really helped me to connect with my boyfriend grandmother and help her to feel some purpose as she finds life very difficult due to her condition.
Putting images into chronological order
I sat down with Jake’s nan after finding all of these images in the small room and asked her to help me put them into chronological order, so I have quite a few which I will need to cut down on. But I am happy with the content that I have currently, I believe that I will need a couple more images of Jake’s nan now and the stuff that she does as well as a couple more scans, but after that I am confident that I have enough content for my book.
More Archive stuff
I went through some more stuff in the spare room and hit the jackpot! I found loads of photographs, letters, jewellery and plenty of other things. I believe that I now have a lot of content and enough to start putting together the book, I need to get some more diary entries and some of Jake’s nan’s writing as quotes. I feel I may take some photographs of her jewellery and then have quotes next to them or her handbags as she has so many due to overbuying them as she loves them! I want to show a lot of characteristics, who she is as a person through this book, also how she is now a completely different person due to being burdened with this dreadful condition.
Parkinson's Disease
Parkinson’s Disease is a progressive neurological illness which causes problems with the brain; it is caused by the brain not having enough Dopamine as a number of the nerve cells which produce this chemical have died.
Around 145’000 people have been diagnosed with this condition in the UK however it is known that over a million people are affected by the illness either by having it first hand or by being close friends, a relative or a colleague of someone who does.
Three of the main symptoms are shaking, slow movement and muscle stiffness; however, there are many over symptoms that can be caused by this condition.
Jake’s nan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in April 2009 - this was just over 11 years ago.
She suffers terribly with anxiety and nervousness and can get herself into a right state when she is unable to do something due to her Parkinsons. She also has arthritis which causes her a lot of pain. Due to these illnesses, she is chair bound as she struggles to move around or stand up for too long. She relies on her medication to help her to be able to have any sort of normality in her life. When her pills start to wear off, she ends up in a lot of pain and most of the time. She cannot move until she has taken her next dose and then she has to wait half an hour before they start to kick on, which causes her a lot of frustration.
My boyfriend, myself, her carers and anyone else around trying to help and support her in as many ways as we can, we often have to sit with her for several minutes to help her up, or we help her by doing things that she cannot do, but that cause her stress.
She has four carers who come throughout the day, one for breakfast, lunch, tea, and to put her to bed; they come for 45 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes the other times. The timings are always different, and this can stop Jake’s nan from being able to go out (when she can) as otherwise, she has to cancel the carers which she does not like to do.
She tries to find pleasure in little things, such as colouring, feeding the foxes (as I have previously mentioned), she watches a lot of films, mostly ones involving Clint Eastwood as she loves him. She loves to spend money on clothes, and she loves to buy presents for people, I think seeing that she is making people happy by giving them presents brings her a lot of joy. She donates money to quite a few charities, including the Donkey Sanctuary, the Salvation Army and any others she can find.
Richard Billingham - Ray's a laugh
Richard Billingham is an British photographer, artist, cinematographer and teacher who was born in 1970. He is best known for his photographic Book ‘ Ray’s a laugh’ which observes his somewhat ‘dysfunctional’ family in his project where his father, Ray, is an alcoholic and his mother, Liz, is very heavily tattooed and obese.
The way he takes his photos is quite similar to what you would expect to see in a family album however there seems to be quite a melancholic felling about these images, mostly due to the colours within the photographs, they are quite dull and cold which is the opposite to what you would expect from family photographs, personally I would expect warmth and more flattering images shown of my family members.
Richard Billingham, from series Ray’s a Laugh, 1994
It seems rather unusual that Billingham would choose to take this photograph of his mother glaring and clenching her fist at his father. He had no intentions of hiding what his family is like which I find to be quite unusual as most people would try to hide anything wrong about their families, especially from the whole world to see.
I admire Richard Billingham for this as he has no shame in showing what his family are really like, which is something you do not come across very often. He is showing that not all families are perfect and that we all have faults in them, but we choose not to make those faults public.
'Gordan MacDonald: How did your parents feel about you taking up art?
Richard Billingham: They were indifferent to it. They probably liked it because, if I was drawing, I was occupied and didn't need looking after.' (https://photoworks.org.uk/richard-billingham/, 2007)
After reading the interview he had with Gordan MacDonald, founding editor of Photoworks Magazine, I realised that it seems his parents gave him little attention as they appeared to be preoccupied with other things. I realise now that the soul purpose of these images was not to be displayed as photographs; they were taken as raw material for paintings. It was only when the editor for the Telegraph was made aware of them that they started to become displayed. Billingham had almost no intention of them being seen, especially not by such a broad audience. However, he also does not seem bothered that the images have been viewed as he states - 'I don't owe them anything and I never thought they would be shown in a gallery at that stage anyway. I thought they would be in a book and it would have a specialist market and not really a wide audience.' (Richard Billingham, 2007). After he realised these images were going to become part of a project, he started researching into photographers and looking at how they complete projects. This probably worked as a sort of phototherapy for him in the way that he was able to take photographs of his family the way that he sees them.
I found this project to be very inspiring towards my current project as I feel Jake's nan is not your every day 'stereotype' of a grandmother as she does not cook, or knit or do any of the kind of things you would expect your grandmother to do. As she is sort of a, as she calls it: surrogate grandmother to me, I find this idea rather intriguing. She often tells me stories that are quite unconventional but also quite hilarious. Due to her being this way of 'not what you would expect from a grandmother' I feel 'Ray's a Laugh' has helped me get a better understanding of how to approach taking photographs of her and how to show this different side of her.
‘Not only is the situation unseemly and somewhat repulsive, as the mother hardly conforms to the pattern according to which she has been arranged’ (Orskou, 2003). As the mother is not what you would expect, due to her being severely obese and heavily tattooed, it seems to cause an uproar to some of the viewers as they may find it ‘repulsive’ however I agree with the next quote - …‘it is an image of love for his mother - Orskou finds it repulsive because it does not conform to her notion of correct feminine motherhood’ (Hatherley, 2018, p.365). Billingham does not have another view of what a mother ‘should’ look like, and so this is what he is hat he knows, and it proves that there is not stereotype however as humans we tend to create these sort of expectations and like to judge people when they do not conform to them.
Friday's Crit
Today we had a Crit, but not a normal one as we still have two weeks until our hand in date. I made a PowerPoint of all the stuff I have achieved up to date and what I need to do in the oncoming weeks.
Due to the exceptional circumstances of our current times, my motivation, as well as almost everyone I know's motivation, is virtually non-existent. And so that means that I now have a lot of work to get together before the hand in.
I have a lot of research to get done, and I need to get some text together by scanning in some of Jake's nan's diary entries and get some extracts from the book she is writing.
Once that is done, I can start getting the book together and start coming to a close with the project.
Below is the PowerPoint I presented to my group.
Playing around with Layout
I have tried to play around a little bit with the materials that I have, but from I have learnt that I need more archives as I feel maybe this project would benefit from being a linear sequence within a book. The reason I would like to make this a book is because Jakes nan is currently writing a book. So I feel this imagery is a way of putting visuals to the words she is writing; I think I may use her words next to the images in my project as a collaboration.
Shoot 2 - Locations
I asked Jakes, nan, to write me a list of place that she feels are significant to her growing up, I felt this would help me to get a proper feel of her younger self before I knew her. She gave me several houses that were, luckily, 5 minutes walk away from her home now! Amongst the houses I was able to go to for this shoot was; the house she was born in, the house she first lived in, the building where she had her first job at the age of 15 as a hairdresser and also the bus stops that we used to catch the bus to school. Unfortunately, a lot of the buildings are quite different now, one of them is now a PDSA charity shop. However, the preschool she attended is still the same building which I found to be lovely.
Pierre Gonnard
From the 13th of December until the 27th of January 2019, the Leica gallery showcased a fascinating exhibition which composed of showing the French artist, Pierre Gonnord’s work and his project ‘Nature Tales’. The exhibition consists of several diptychs of his which display a human face with an animal alongside it.
Gonnord, P. Max 2019 and Elena, 2010, Leica Gallery
‘If Rembrandt were a photographer instead of a painter, and if he were drawn to the margins of society rather than to himself (and his other subjects) he might have produced works very much like those of Pierre Gonnord.’ – (Tim McLaughlin, 2012)
His images are very soft and have quite a beautiful lighting; he chooses his subjects with great care and photographs in precise ways – ‘His subjects’ faces are always set against a dark background’ (Bob Chaundy, 2019). The black background allows the face to be lit softly but also to keep the focus specific. His subjects are somewhat known to be underprivileged as Gonnord states he looks for characters that “are lost, collapsed by the system” (Pierre Gonnord, unknown)
This particular diptych spoke out to me the most as I felt a real connection between the bird and the women, I think this connection is due to the similarity in looks, colour and the pose in which they are photographed.
When viewing this project, it came across as very beautiful and silent; he chose the subjects carefully and placed the animals next to the portraits. – ‘In these portraits, he asks the viewer to look beyond the genetic profile of each subject, feel their individual spirit and personality and also the relationship within each juxtaposition.’ (https://en.leica-camera.com/Leica-Galleries/Leica-Gallery-London/News-Program/Pierre-Gonnord-Nature-Tales, 2018)
The photographs are from different times, so I guess that having these images together was not an intentional approach. Still, it is, in my opinion, a successful one.
Gonnord used mythical backgrounds of the animals when choosing which creature to place next to the portraits. Still, incredibly they work so well next to each subject aesthetically - ‘Drawing on the rich visual tapestry of time-old fables of mythical animals and magical creatures.’
– (https://lfionline.de/ceemes/en/shop/london_leica-gallery_pierre-gonnord-1006483.html, 2019)
I found the exhibition to be quite intriguing. It has inspired me to take a similar approach with this project and bring Jakes nans portrait next to the foxes as they play a significant part in her life, or maybe have a better-composed image of her cat next to her on a page as her cat also plays a massive role in her life. His work is a little bit more staged compared to what I would like to show as I want mine to come across as more natural; however, I like the idea of the layout next to the animal and the significance that animal has to the subjects.
Jake's nan??
I was showing my boyfriend my ideas and research for this project, and he asked me why I always refer to his grandmother as ‘Jake’s nan’ and to be honest, I didn’t know how to answer that! Her name is Jill Moore, but I have always called her ‘Jake’s nan’ and because of that odd remark I feel maybe I should title this project ‘Jake’s nan’.
Shoot 2 - Miscellaneous of Jakes Nan and Around the House.
Here are some images I took of Jake’s nan and around the house, including her cat whom she adores! The images are of significant items that I feel are relevant to her character, she loves plants, and she is always talking about what we need to tidy as the house is always messy.
Shoot 1 - Night Time Wildlife Shoot
Unfortunately, as Jake’s nan is almost chair bound, she struggles to find purpose in the things she does and so feeding the foxes every night allows her to feel that she is helping in some way, she loves animals more than humans!
I thought as this is such a big part of her life that it had to be in my project, so I bought a wildlife camera from Amazon, and we put it out thinking that we would only get foxes as there are a lot of them in our area. However, we were also astonished to see that there are badgers that come and eat from the food!
For Jake’s nan to see how she is them eating the food made her so happy, and now she makes sure to do an extra box for the badger!
Archival Images - Random images
These images are mostly of Jakes nan when she was younger and her children, but I found them to be very intriguing as they are showing me a side of her that I don’t really know very well, seeing her children younger is quite funny as they do not look much different to what they do now. I always love looking at pictures of people before I knew them, but when you live with someone who has become such a good friend, it’s so odd when you found out how interesting their life was when they were younger.
Mind Map
Archival Images - Stamp book collection
After speaking with Jake’s nan about the purpose of this project and what I would like to show as imagery, she got out a load of old photographs and some items from her cupboard that she had when she was younger. One of the things being a Stamp Book where she collected stamps from all different places and put them in this book, I was genuinely interested by this as she seemed to have spent a lot of time on it. She also found some old images of her, her sisters and her parents, which were all very interesting.
Object, figure, space proposal.
For this project, I would like to focus on ‘Invisible Illnesses’ and how they can affect people’s day to day life.
In December 2019, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes pain all over the body as well as a large number of other symptoms. I have had symptoms for a very long time, however not knowing what was causing the aches and pains, I was always told to ‘stop complaining’ and lots of other things. On top of this, I have always struggled with severe depression and anxiety due to several factors from childhood. A lot of people who do not have these problems, will not understand what it is like and will often, as I have noticed, take their health for granted, they also tend to believe that if you can do something easily one day, that you can do it every day. Still, they don’t understand that every day is different.
A lot of people believe that because we don’t ‘look sick’ that we are making it up or being overdramatic, but these conditions that are ‘invisible’ can affect someone’s life to an extreme amount. I for one find it very difficult to get a job, hence why I am currently in the process of applying for benefits, which I have been criticised for as people have told me I am merely lazy.
In the last couple of months, I have tried to connect with people with other illnesses similar to mine to see how they deal with their situations, and a lot of us seem to have similar problems. My Boyfriends nan has got Parkinson’s disease, which also has some unseen aspects to it, which can vary from day to day. Sometimes, she can walk around the house quickly, but other times she can’t even get out of her chair.
I would like to try and put this issue and idea into a project so that people can try to understand how difficult life can be when you have an illness like this. But also to allow them to understand maybe why some people are not able to do things or for example if someone who looks ‘healthy’ is parked in a disabled space.
I will be mostly focusing on my boyfriend’s nan with her Parkinson’s and other conditions that she has alongside this by photographing her daily life and the struggles that come along with it. She likes to feed the foxes in the evening as it gives her pleasure due to her not being able to do much. I would like to possibly bring in some archival images showing her when she was ‘well’ and was able to move around quickly as it is surprisingly sad to see how much life changes once you are burdened with a condition like hers. So much can change, losing friends, changing routines, having a low mood, etc.
I feel this project will also help me to learn how to cope with my illness, so I would like to use it as a coping mechanism to get me up and motivated as it is a subject that I have grown very passionate about in the last couple of years.