In Between Dreams by Will Hartley

The font is varied on this post – wordpress is being funny.

I saw this today on foto8. I was excited about it, I had hoped to see something of the lives of the squatters,  learn something I didn’t know. Then I started looking through the images and I  saw a lot of under exposed images portraits, jaunty angels and blurry images that maybe are there to convey a sense of movement or action or whatever.

What I would have liked would have been to see more of these images – more descriptive images which let me see things I wouldn’t know of otherwise: Something else I would have liked to have seen more of is how they live –  most of the images are of people sleeping or sharing a moment in nice light but that leaves the whole project unbalanced I feel. The image of them raiding bins is so disappinting for me also because again it just looks like it’s been snapped so quickly without any consideration.

I’m not looking for him to set up a tripod and get all of his lines straight or something but surely you’ve been bin raiding a lot with these people and ad plenty of chances. I can’t see anything – I get a slight sense of urgency from the jaunty angle and slight movement but not enough – it could be better.

This image here- although it’s like a lot of the images (people sleeping in their squatters accommodation) it’s more interesting for me because it looks like it’s a disused business rather than an disused house/flat,  and if the photographer is trying to communicate that squatters don’t just live in nice old buildings then I think more of this would have been good.  The rest of the images seem to be from flats and houses. 

So yeah I was disappointed. I can’t stress enough how disengaging portraits can be. You are just looking at a photograph of someone  you don’t know unless the photographer actually captures something and with portraiture, most people don’t. It’s so sad to see such  a missed opportunity,  so many empty images.

Is this an attempt to keep people anonymous? Again – the high contrast, lost blacks, bad composition? I think even if the child’s face was still in shadow and you could see the other persons face that would give some emotion and power to the image.

This image is nice but it looks like it’s been taking in a moment of haste – the angel and composition only detract from it for me.

Although I’ve went through individual images, I realise it’s a whole story but I’ve selected images that let me talk about the fault I find with the project as a whole.

It is really nice and encouraging to see people like Will on foto8 though – he is just at the beginning of his career(I think!) and I hope he goes on to make much more exciting work.