Scattered...

Initially I struggled with choosing between the three options for this project, but after grasping for inspiration for a few weeks I settled on option 3.

Originally my exhibition was going to be an exploration of the contrast between holidays and real life. What it means to visit somewhere and what it means to belong there. However as I began to collect photographs from my intrepid friends for the vacation section, my vision of the concept began to evolve. All these photographs from all over the world, of famous and not so famous locations, got me thinking about the experience of discovery, of the backpacker, an individual who is constantly travelling and embodies the idea that the journey is more important than the destination.

The photographs used were selected from a pool of approximately 100 images, all taken by friends of mine who have lived this exploration experience. They were chosen not necessarily for their beauty or compositional skill, but for their location. The photographs vary from postcard-ready images to typical holiday snaps, to candid and sometimes intimate moments. This also was a conscious decision. I wanted to really infuse the exhibition with this sense of variety - of moments and locations. The aim being that the themes of vastness and exploration would contrast comfortably with the suggestion that the world is not so big after all, and that we all share a connection. The concern was then how this amalgam of diversity and connection could best be represented visually.

Flickr was the ideal medium for this. Not only was I able to show all the images side by side as thumbnails, almost like one big image, hinting at the idea of connection and linking, I could also make use of the map tagging function to show physically where these photographs were taken to capture the contrasting vastness of it all.

The order of the photographs derived chiefly from contrasting their locations with the photograph before and after. I tried to organise them so that the viewer felt as though they were jumping all over the world, from Cambodia to Mexico to Greece to Holland to Scotland to New Zealand etc etc. This is where the name Scattered came from, and the idea that while these people are spread out all over the world they all have the same spirit at heart.