Palfreyman became homeless after leaving his family home as a teenager to travel around Europe for three years, and when he returned his parents kicked him out the house due to him not living up to their expectations. He comments in an interview that when he first moved to London he didn't sleep for three days straight because he was too scared, and had to sleep with one eye open most nights.
After 30 years on the streets of London Palfreyman has put on a photographic exhibition of all the places that he used to sleep in with brief descriptions of each place. He titled his exhibition 'Cardboard and Caviar'.
He borrowed his friends camera and went about photographing each of his favourite rough sleeping spots. The images are very lifeless, this is because of basic angles that he used and also the subject being of un-interesting shapes. What really brings these images to life is the brief description he has made under each one, because one gets a sense of his personality and what it might actually be like to spend a night in the spot photographed.
What I like about his photographs is the straight-on angles he's captured the different scenes at, which gives the viewer a sense that they are seeing it exactly how it is, without any subjective angles. I think this sort of technique is one that I should try to carry on within my project, which should hopefully show the viewer exactly how certain homeless people in Manchester live.
Another technique which is interesting in his work and ties back one of my previous techniques, is the idea of time and movement in the images. Because when viewing his work, you naturally add him into the scene after reading the description, which for me actually brightened up the end picture from quite a cold concrete look into one with more life captured in it. This is something that I touched upon previously in this unit when I found out that the Oxford Road Camp had been moved, which allowed me to produce before and after images which showed the amount of life that had been lost from the scene after the council moved the homeless people on.
I think the idea of movement and time, is one that I should definitely carry on with, while also trying to capture the images in the same objective technique that Palfreyman has shown in his images.
