Kevin Bauman

Those four photos were from my little photo shoot over at Leavesden mental hospital on the 22nd October 2011, all taken with a Nikon D3000. I took two of my friends on the 40 minute walk from my house over to the place where my mother once lived with her family (not as patients, but as both my grandparents worked there for a period of time), and where people went when they lost their minds. It's an incredibly sad place to walk around, and the scenery has completely changed, what was once a reception and a few main wards have become flats and what was once a dining area has been completely knocked down and a park was built in its place, the only things still standing either serving their purpose or left unchanged is the barn and sewage plant, the cemetery, the house at the end of the grounds and the chapel. The chapel doesn't really concern me much, it's not weathered or worn or tired, it stands as it was, completely unchanged, as if it'll stand there forever, whereas the barn & plant, the cemetery and ground house are abandoned and have been for many years, without much care or attention, though the plant was bought by a Shane Anthony Lanigan, in hopes of using it for something, but never did. I find the emptiness of the place eerie, never mind the knowledge that it once housed people with dire thoughts and vivid hallucinations. 

I've always been a fan of abandoned places, it's always been the wonder of why that does it for me, the fact that they stand so weak looking now, but so so strong. I would like to think they reflect me, maybe.

Kevin Bauman did the set 100 abandoned houses and photographed around his hometown, Detroit. He did it to show how awful Detroit had become, with it's constant lack of people to occupy the space, but the fact is, sadly, that all abandoned places only light an emotion in someone that has been destroyed by something themselves, by a person or place or feeling. People that have been down but not destroyed simply can't see the same impact, which is actually incredibly frightful, but you can't fight that in a person, you have to allow them to believe it's a useless space till they can feel the same thing.

It's difficult, but they'll come around.

I also find the fact that all the photos are face on, it's almost horrifying, as if it's staring you down, and trying to merge itself with you to rekindle the dying emotion that we suppress all our lives.
We've all been abandoned.
I simply can't understand that someone could not see the pain in these pictures, they may not understand them, but there is an overwhelming attack of pain and partial panic in these, and I think that's what I actually like about them.

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Abandonment and loss (AS work)

I find there's a sort of universal feeling of abandonment with everybody now, no matter where you go, or who you talk to, or what you believe, there's a sense of abandonment or loss with everyone.
Last year during Photography AS I pretty much continually showed all this loss and hurt in my work, and molded my work around the thoughts and feelings of the abandoned mind, as it were.

"The mediation between expectation and thought"

Taken with a Fujifilm Finepix s5800 this year.

Chris Martin-Taylor in Watford town center.

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"The worst abuser"

14 prints out of 78 cigarette packets I photographed.

I asked a numerous amount of people to either write on a packet or give me something to write on them,

I kept 8 of my favorite's ranging from "I miss my old life" to "I want to die" but my personal number one is the green Mayfair Menthol 10s packet with "it's OK" written on.

These were both finals for last years AS, and were very much influenced by my prior diary's, the people around me and my own thoughts and emotions; both were titled by the first line of two diary's.
It's something that's said regularly, by regular people, but really, I have actually suffered a lot of loss, and a lot of hurt has come from that, and the sort of loss I've dealt with is something that doesn't leave you, it instead leaves you with emotion that drowns you very quickly unless you find something to force it at, to hope it leaves you. I showed going through loss alone in "the mediation between expectation and thought" through showing complete loneliness in a seemingly busy place, and how when you really burst out of that place, there's no real relief, you must carry on going, despite the fact you feel you've dealt with whatever is killing you, and in "The worst abuser" I showed collective loss, how everybody feels abandoned by something, but really, it's all the same thing. It started off as a show on addiction, how we're all addicted to something, be it beauty, weight, cigarettes, drugs, food.... anything, yet it's all very similar. I found throughout setting up, though, that people tended to feel really possessive over the packet that held their quote, as if they were trying to hold on to whatever was hurting, rather than let it hurt them again, and I quickly changed my plan to loss.

Stephen Gill

This is Stephen Gills 'Outside In', a series I once saw down in Brighton, infact, I saw last November, in Brighton.
Each photo in the Outside In series is essentially a photograph with a place, with bits of plant life, rubbish found on the floor, seeds, grass, and even insects on the film. The object sits on the film emulsion when he's taking the picture. Its a perfect way of actually combining a place with the essence of that place. It shows how people live, the visual noise they have around them and the complete choas that that entails.
We so often live without really stopping to look at how and where we live, how people are, what surroundings we have and how that actually affects us, and our lives.
Gill used this method to show that we dont really know or stop to think of any of this till we process the film of our lives, we don't know where our emotions (the objects) will sit or fall, and we live half blind of who we are.
Similarly, if you were to create a photogram (placing objects onto a piece of darkoom (light sensitive) paper, shining a light, and then developing the paper, leaving a white 'shadow' of the object) you would have a similar result, you don't know what you're going to get, or how the objects come together if they're just a white shadow. You could even use a negative to provide a sort of background, as I have done in the past, or, if your only option is digital, getting a photograph and placing white cut outs of an image onto the photograph, then photographing that photograph and editing it till it looks like its come straight from a darkroom. You can manipulate the way you see things, and the way we view things so easily, yet we never choose to do it.

Outside In is very close to me as I'm so very interested in other peoples minds, how they percieve things, the ideas they have and the way they view their lives, everyone has this different interpretation of life, but we all live together without sharing this interpretation.
I've used Gills work to inspire a project i did last year, where i picked up one thing each day, created a collection and photographed it. By using slices of other peoples lives that they'd discarded on the street, I managed to show how close as people we are, but how much we discard each other, and how much of our lives we choose to ignore.

When Gill showed his work, he put in the center all the things he'd collected, which is exactly what I did when it came to my exhibition, and I find it shows alot about the processes of life and the things we are, the things we take, the things we discard, the things that make us up.

I think everyone can find a little slice of themselves in Outside In, and if you can't, you simply aren't looking hard enough.


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