Recently I’ve been using photographs to develop ideas around writing. Earlier this year, I bought a Nikon D40. Much to the annoyance of my mates, I’ve been taking it everywhere. I’m still in that trigger happy honey moon period.

In April I started to take pictures of friends wearing hoodies. I found the pictures released ideas, questions and inspirations.

This is a picture of my friend Lydia. Not realising how zoomed in I was, I took a close up image of the enormous hoodie she was wearing. And then by total fluke, I got this image of a bus whizzing past as her head was turned to the side.

Again, the image below was an accident and just happened to come out with the foreground out of focus.

This got me thinking about our perceptions of what we see as ‘hoodies’. When we use that word, are we loading it with other understandings of delinquent youth, young people, ASBOs, masking and misbehavior? By ‘zooming’ in on the individuals that we view as disruptive, are we blurring our vision to the societal surroundings that can sometimes create that behaviour.

It’s unlikely that these photos will inspire writing about a girl in a hoodie or a bus passing. What they do give me is colour, concept and movement, foreground and background. All things that I can use when putting pen to paper.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 9:09 am and is filed under Yemisi Blake. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.