For the final year the focus has been towards a large, mostly self driven photography project with the research driven proposal in the first half, and now the fun part! IMAGE MAKING. This final project will focus on the beekeeping community of the Christchurch and Canterbury region. My goal is to capture images of New Zealand’s beekeeping community and their culture, related to their environments in which they operate. I will demonstrate and link how the commercially independent people of beekeeping, and their activities, work with the environment through a series of photographs, and a zine. The images will be created alongside questions to add context and narrative to the beekeepers’ unique process and stories. I want to showcase New Zealand’s unique beekeeping communities and the environments that they work within. If you are interested in my full proposal of the project, you can download and view the PDF here.

I aim to answer my questions visually using 6×6 medium format cameras, as well as recording the subjects answers to a series of questions over here. These recordings will be translated into text to accompany the images and provide cohesion between the two. Yesterday I captured my first set of images out near Mount Oxford, just minutes from the carpark. Initial imagery will consist of visits to locations ahead of portraits. This set reflects that initial exploration. Each week I’ll me making images, and as a class we will talk about our process, progress, project goals, and also print work and share in the physical world. Black and white were captured on Rolleicord VB and Ilford Hp5, the colour set on Yashica635 and Kodak Portra.