First Photo Shoot at Street Wise Gym, Loughton

15thMarch2014

(Authors Own, Portraits of Boxers)

(Authors Own, Documenting Street-wise gym in Loughton)

This particular page demonstrates the images I produced on my visit to Street-Wise gym in Loughton. On arrival I aimed to only capture footage for a short film, but when I had finished up with the filming a member of the gym asked me to take a picture of him posing with a fellow fighter "Phillip Bowes" [who I filmed]. I was initially determined to produce my documentary style images in an old fahsioned, vintage gym e.g. Repton Boxing Gym in Bethnal Green, so that my compositions echoed character and history that is often associated with boxing. When I was actually there, in the thick of all the testosterone, sweat and grunts, the atmosphere alone created a perfect environment for me to shoot. This sparked a spontaneous idea so I had to think fast about the sort of outcomes I had planed, combined with having to adapt my initial ideas to suit the new location. Unprepared and not very confident I continued to take these "typical" after fight shots of some of the guys. Following on from this I asked a few more members if it would be ok for me to take some simple portraits of them. Some were confident and happy to help, while others were not so sure, but with a bit of persuasion I managed to capture some really beautiful high contrast, black and white images. The compositions are simple head shots with complementing backgrounds, which have been edited in Adobe Photoshop so that the focus is on the individual with a subtle hint of boxing in the background to confirm the meaning of the shoot. The other images have the same impression as the portraits, but unlike the portraits, these images are less contrived with no posing at all. I just observed some of the things going on in the gym, such as training, sparing, resting, equipment etc and documented it as everything was happening around me. I am really happy with both sets of imagery I have produced. Although it wasn't what I had originally set out to do, I feel that I have exceeded my first idea by creating an atmosphere of adventure, experience and history purely through the use of photography, and carefully selected compositions.  

Following on from this photo shoot was another peer crit session. This time there were different people in my group which meant I acquired different and unique responses and ideas, this is always useful to me because I think I learn best when I analyse other peoples work and vise-verse. I raised the point based upon my own work that I wasn't entirely happy about the way in which my project was moving in. I thought it was too sport based and there weren't enough conceptual, interesting, thought provoking ideas incorporated within in the work. I proposed the visualization of contrasting the conflicting practice of Dance with Boxing. Not everyone was keen on the idea, but I was given loads of great ideas that I could use in my work. For example someone suggested comparing and contrasting the different between street fighting / judo with boxing, another suggestion was child boxing / women's boxing with male boxing. I personally thought that contrasting another fight based sport or opposite sex boxing was still too sport based and this isn't what I was really aiming for. I still considered some of the ideas I was given, but im also interesting to explore the idea of dance.

(Authors Own, Documenting Street-wise gym in Loughton)

(Authors Own, Documenting Street-wise gym in Loughton)