AD5803 - Unsustainability project development

During the last week, I emailed many organizations that are involved in supporting the victims of modern slavery. Unfortunately (as I expected) only a few of them got back to me, but with a negative response.

For security reasons, the identities of people involved in trafficking and slavery must be kept as safe as possible and only a few journalists and photographers are allowed to work with them.

Only one organization gave me the contact of an independent group of victims that may have been keen to collaborate, but I wanted to reflect more about my options before possibly contact them.

To me it was a priority to keep them safe and built the project together, so I started looking for alternative ways to portray them.

Initially, I was thinking that I could play with blurry pictures and text, so I did some tests using headshots that I took last year.

Test 1

Test 1

Test 2

Here I tried to blur a section of the picture and write "their" story on it.

It really doesn't work.

Test 2

Test 3

Test 4

In this test I tried to obscure a part of the picture.

Again, it really doesn't work.

So I spoke with Julia for pieces of advice and she borrowed me the book "A Room of Their Own" by Susan Meiselas.

This is a project about women who have been sexually abused and they now live in a refuge. The photographer dedicates a few pages to each victim, writing their stories, or just some quotes; and including pictures of the space in which they live, but never portraying them directly.

So I considered to do something similar, maybe taking pictures of the victims during their ordinary daily life, and revealing only at the end the subject matter. The message would have been that slavery happens to absolutely ordinary people, anyone can be involved.

However, this idea had two (at least) big issues:

1- I was assuming that this group would have given me the permission

2- It is not my style of photography, I NEED portraits.

I was getting very upset because I felt like "my project" was there, but I had to solve this puzzle to find a solution.

Another idea was relying on the contacts I have in the project that I am doing with Florence, but I had to make sure to keep the two works different and separated.

On Friday I spoke with Jane as well about my dilemma and she gave me a really good piece of advice. She said: "Why don't you do it more ironically, like about people working for McDonalds and other chains?"

I liked the idea, in this way I would not have the problem about vulnerable subjects because I was dealing with "legal slavery". Finding people involved really would not have been a problem, and since I had myself an absolutely horrible experience in the past working for Pret A Manger, I was personally involved and I was going in the right direction.

So, I needed to organise my ideas and put them on paper.

Here there are some scans from my sketchbook:

I started developing ideas from Jane's suggestion; the options were endless. I could focus on "time", like the speed of productivity, the speed of customer service, fast fashion... I could just focus on exploitation on the workplace, I liked the link between "chains" intended as food chains, retail chains, etc... and the chains of slavery.

But I felt like I still wanted to include something about migration.

I wrote some posts on Facebook groups, asking about personal experiences at work in the UK and who would have been interested in collaborating for a project. And then I suddenly realised what was the project I was looking for.

The migration of Italian in the UK. I want to do a project about the reasons in my country that push so many people to come here and, consequently, develop a project accusing the contemporary politics in Italy.

The responses I had from people on social network was great and I have been contacted by a journalist who really wants to collaborate together and I am gonna meet him tomorrow in London.

The message read between the lines of this project, is the comparison between the migrants coming to Italy, that are constantly accused by our government, and the Italian migrants coming to England, that are seen as heroes, and we are doing exactly the same thing.

For this reason, I want to entitled the book "On the Same Boat", which clearly plays with the image of the migrants travelling across the Mediterranean Sea on boats, and the idiom which means to be in the same situation.

Now the question is, how do I want to shoot these people?