AD5803 - Self-evaluation

The project that I developed for this module has been one of the most challenging yet interesting that I have ever undertaken in my photography practice. My initial idea was very different from the final outcome and this series dramatically changed shape during its process. At the very beginning, I wanted to document the contemporary issue of modern slavery in the UK; I was very determined in this goal but, unfortunately, I underestimated the obstacles in getting access to certain subjects and I was not going anywhere. I considered alternative solutions in order to document the same issue, like using a mock documentary approach, but every idea was quite weak and did not sound exciting to me. The turning point arrived when I have been suggested that I could look at the problem of modern slavery in a more ironical way, for example, considering people working in food-chains or any other low wage consuming job. This possibility literally gave fuel to my inspiration, and by doing several mind-maps, researches, and contacting people on Facebook groups, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to do a project about the situation of the Italians in London. I have been directly involved in the flow of Italians coming to work in London ending up doing alienating jobs, so I was really motivated. While making contacts, I got to know an Italian journalist who was very enthusiastic about my idea and was happy to support me collaborating in the project. This sounded good to me, so I went to London in order to make a solid plan together and starting the project. Our meeting went very well and he would have been an incredible source of contacts; however, when I left, I realised that I wasn't very keen about this collaboration. First of all, when I am developing a project, I need to have control of the situation. While collaborating with him, I felt like I could not engage with my subjects as I would do working on my own and, consequently, I was not doing a good job and I could not feel the ownership of the project as I wanted. During this year, I undertook another collaborative project, working side by side with Miriam, but the sensation was completely different. The journalist that I met, has a more extrovert personality than mine and while working along with him I felt like I could not get the full attention of "my subjects", consequently I could not get that level of connection that allows me to tell their story. Another problem was the difficulty to develop a project based in London; time and costs would not have been sustainable for me. However, the biggest problem was the project itself; by developing that series I would have got a long list of extremely similar and repetitive experiences. Repetition can actually represent the feature of a project, but I felt like I had much more to tell that the stories of Italians going to find a job in London, I wanted to go much deeper in this phenomenon. The commissioned project that I started this year and I am currently doing about the Windrush generation and the African diaspora, put me face to face with the theme of migration; I was already very sensitive to this topic, but by hearing the stories in the first person I really realised the parallelisms between every migratory flow, regardless the time in history, the countries and the nationalities involved. From this statement, "On the Same Boat" started taking shape. This title is highly symbolic, it means "to be in the same situation", but it also recalls the images of migrants crossing the sea on rubber boats. This message "between the lines" that links the Italians and the migrants crossing the sea, was very important to me. Current popular opinion in Italy is taking an extreme right inclination and migrants are politicians' favourite scapegoats for our national problems. The paradox is that the Italians leaving are considered "brain-drain", but the people coming to Italy are blamed to ruin our economy. Why privileged people should have the right to have a better future and people who really come from deprived living situations should just "stay in their own country"? All those thoughts expanded my project, which I like to simply describe as "a reflection about migration", leaving it open to different readings. Then, I just kept on meeting people and listening to their stories. Every person that I met, allowed me to make a step toward the next one. By following this route, I was thinking about the approach taken by Mark Wilson in his Shoah's survivors project; when, during his talk in Hardwick, I asked him how did he find his subjects, he simply said that each story naturally brought him to the following one. That's how I did. Now that I have finished this project and I can look at it as a whole, I am very satisfied with the results, but I would not be honest to say that I have always felt confident and proud about what I was doing. The biggest challenge has been the new approach I had to take. This is a documentary project that I had to develop with a "journalistic" approach. I was following my narrative, I was inside the story on a broad level, but I wasn't inside each story. It may sound difficult to explain, but I could spend limited time with each person and in that time I knew I had to do an interview and take a portrait, I could not really get personally involved in their lives following a natural process. I had to set an appointment and do my job, sometimes I felt like I was working for a newspaper and I didn't like it. I don't have this sensation anymore now, because I kept in contact with everybody and they have all seen and collaborated in the final editing of my book. In the end, this project has really turned into a collaboration, and I am very proud and excited to have shown the links between all those people who don't know each other but they can see how much they share in common. I believe that it really took some time to focus myself on this project, and only toward the end, I genuinely started to believe in what I was doing. It has been very challenging and I can see how much I developed new skills, such as interviewing, book designing and storytelling. Editing the interviews has been another difficult part of this project since I had to select which parts to transcribe and which ones to cut out, but I felt like every missing piece of information would have somehow changed the meaning. For this reason, this book is quite text-rich, it is meant to be a project that makes the viewer reflect and I decided that I wanted the stories to have the space that they needed.

In conclusion, I am proud of the progress that I made through this module and I wish I had the same determination during all the development of this project, which sometimes has suffered from my negligence. However, I believe that this is my personal project which has been more thoughtful and, in the end, it resulted in a solid documentary piece.