Lupton is a Manchester-based photographer who works in a documentary style. I took inspiration from her Levenshulme People project when photographing Levenshulme shopkeepers, but I was also drawn to her project, The Mothers, which was recommended to me by a number of people.
Originally I’d imagined that the photos would be part of an exhibition, but in reality I had to admit that the photos weren’t necessarily the strongest part of the project. It became apparent that the women’s stories were as important (if not more important) as the photos were and so an exhibition wasn’t necessarily the right place to show the project.
Lupton interviews her subjects, using a specific set of questions and so I was interested in finding out how she went about producing her work. Len Grant recommended I speak to her as somebody who approached her work in a different way to him.
How do you decided to photograph your subjects in a particular way? Your 'Mothers' photos are all quite different and I wondered if you decided beforehand what you wanted to do, or whether the personality of the subject influenced it? Some of the images are quite melancholy and others look like fun, which made me wonder - you haven't photographed everybody in a set way, so what is the deciding factor? Do the subjects themselves have a say?
The way I photograph 'the mothers' has a kind of formula but I do take a few things into consideration on each shoot...
1. The light in the house can be important.
2. How confident the mums are - some are clearly very confident in front of the camera, others take more coaxing and reassurance. I ask them if they have favourite rooms.
3. If the kids are a bit older I ask where they want to take photos and what they want to be doing in the shots.
4. Because I've done so many now, I have fallen into a bit of a trap where I know what photographs well - eg. windows, sofas with paintings above - maybe it's just my style. There are definitely reoccurring themes in my composition, and I try not to be too predictable, but then it is important that my style can be recognised.
I can't really have any plans before I meet a mum and child/ren because I have no idea what their house is like, how confident in front of the camera they are, where the light will be best. I very rarely know (or remember) the age of the child I'm photographing and that has a MASSIVE impact of the type of photo I'll take. eg. 12mths - 3 yrs are pretty hard to photograph because they are mobile and don't want to be photographed. It's usually a case of chasing the kids and trying to get a few lucky shots! Photographing children is extremely different to adults, because they get bored quickly and are quite unpredictable, so it really is the luck of the draw of my 'Mothers' shoots.
How do you go about getting the written information from your subjects? Do you interview them or ask them to write answers to the questions? The text seems quite conversational but you ask the same questions of each person so I wondered how you achieve that natural feel without it sounding too much like a formal interview? If you do interview, do you record the talking and transcribe afterwards?
I'd say about 95% of women write their own answers. All have very varying styles of writing, but that is good because their 'voice' comes across. The only editing I do is spelling, grammar, etc and maybe juggling sentences around occasionally to make things read better. Frustratingly I have about 15/20 women who have my photographs but have never returned answers...I'm assuming it's a case or lack of confidence in writing the answers, not enough time, or leaving it too long and feeling guilty.
I've written 3 or 4 I think and they do feel quite different to the ones written by the mums themselves. In those interviews I type as they talk, purely because I don't have time to transcribe - it takes forever! It allows me to think about what they've said and if I don't think they've answered the question fully sometimes I'll just generally chat and ask related questions to get them to open up more.
In terms of aesthetics, Lupton's project runs as a blog so follows a fairly standard layout of text interspersed with images (similar to a newspaper or magazine article). This could work well for my own project, and would enable me to use more images, but I also like the idea of the text and imagery being more of a 'piece' that links them together. Lupton's approach is very journalistic in a sense, and although my work could easily follow that style, I would like to experiment further.