Major Practical Project - Nigel Shafran

Of all the research I have ever conducted for my projects, the work I feel I can most relate to is that of Nigel Shafran. His images celebrate the banal - the moments in life that happen to most people every day but no one really thinks about. The washing up, talking on the phone, supermarket checkouts, for example. They are not epic, not by any means, but that is not to say they are not powerful. His subject matter is, for the most part, the mundane, but photographed very simply and absolutely beautifully. The photographs are so easy to relate to, and I think that is what I'm aiming to emulate. Here follows a quote from David Chandler, Director of Photoworks magazine about Shafran's practice (accessed via Shafran's website)

"His current work is characterised by the quiet observation of daily life; focussing on deliberately low-key subject matter that is often domestic in nature: the washing - up, his Dad's office, and, repeatedly, his partner Ruth. Yet his work extracts from these everyday situations something profound and consistently beautiful, the sense of a natural order amid the chaos of ordinary things. 

Shafran has chosen to concentrate his work on what he knows best, on what he understands more then anyone else: his own life - the most personal relationships, the most familiar spaces and objects, the most ordinary, everyday situations. His work is about preserving identity and uniqueness: it quietly records what is unique to him. As he has said: 'My photographs are the ones that only I can make.'"

"4th January 2000. Three bean soup, cauliflower vegetable cheese. Morning coffee and croissants." ©Nigel Shafran

"7th February 2000.  Toast and herbal tea, sausage, mushroom, tomato, egg, toast, Galician tapas and beer with Jack." © Nigel Shafran.

"25th April 2000.  8.00pm by Terry’s watch. Branflakes, toast, mint tea at John and Sara’s in Glasgow. Picked up Iranian pitta filled breads in Glasgow [eaten on motorway], Chicken Dalgleish, potatoes and veg, strawberry and apple sponge with cream at Jill and Terry’s with Jo, Kathy and Ruth." © Nigel Shafran.

As Chandler describes, Shafran's work, although it looks clean and clinical, focusses on those parts of his life that only he can know, that no one else can, or would, make photographs about. He has not gone out of his way to make the photographs particularly extravagant compositionally, allowing the viewer to relate to their banality. Even the captions are merely descriptive, with no hint of the emotions the photographer was feeling about the image or the moment it depicts.

For me, it is the leaving behind of this homeliness that I have been thinking a lot about recently - the little things that only happen in our family home, that no one else knows about. I have been worrying about trying to make my work relateable to other people, but as Shafran has demonstrated, the fact that a photographer has documented these little mundane, personal moments every day does make you think about your own life. He is showing that not everything that is documented photographically has to be extraordinary, it can just be life as it really is.

http://www.nigelshafran.com/