Throughout the semester I have had to make my fair share of creative choices. My whole course centres around ideas and the execution of these ideas. As I was trying to come up with a concept for a photoshoot, I thought about my current ideas and how they are moulded by who I am. All the choices I make are in some way, shape or form directly linked to who I am as a person. I thought about all these fine art photographs that I researched and how they conveyed their understanding of the world. While they looked aesthetically pleasing, some were very confronting. I asked myself if I could ever shoot something exceedingly dark, perhaps exploring the atrocities of abuse, rape, bullying…

I felt like a con artist even thinking about it. I would just be an outsider, looking through a lens and capturing a staged moment that doesn’t make much sense. Then there’s photojournalists who I criticise for their privilege and insider view of war. While I believe in the power of photographs and art, I imagine a person being killed and me photographing that and it disgusts me. They make death and war look like art. Through my research I found Stephen Dupont who is a photojournalists . While his images show the violence of Kabul, he shies away from war zones and blood and shows the real people of Kabul.

In his series, he follows a very eccentric character, with a captivating smile. In one of the images he has a very serious expression, which is unusual and we see him through a broken glass. Dupont informs us of the violence but does not put a face to it. Instead of creating an us and them, Dupont focuses solely on the people. He could have done the cliché thing and taken photos of bearded men carrying guns. As you can tell, throughout this reflection I have changed my mind,  I realise as I write this that it is okay for me to capture images of things I don’t understand so long as I try to. We are all sympathetic creatures, I may not have experienced something but I can try to understand it… the important thing is your focus. As a media practitioner  I always make a choice about which side of the story I want to convey. It is my moral obligation to pick the right one. I understand that through the right kind of exploration of art and photographs, we can shed light to major social issues and taboos. Photographers like… were focusing on sexuality, abuse, mental illness and perhaps it was their creative choices that allowed us to live in a generation so different from their own.