Ben Roberts is a freelance photographer who is based in Madrid, Spain. He has won a range of different awards including LPA Future Awards 2009 and Magenta Flash Forward Emerging Photographers 2011.
Roberts has completed a wide range of different projects including Higher Lands, Amazon Unpacked and The Seventh Zone, but in relation to my current project on the housing problem I'm focusing on his 2011 project Occupied Spaces.
On the 15th October 2011, protesters who represented the global Occupy movement set up a semi-permanent camp outside St Paul's Cathedral in London. The reason for doing this was to protest and raise awareness for the growing social and economic inequalities. But then on the 25th of October several UK newspapers claimed that by thermal imaging they knew that only 10% of the 250 tents were being inhibited over night.
Roberts wanted to capture this intimate spaces and disprove these apparent allegations.
Even though our projects are for completely different reasons, mine and Roberts technique of capturing this temporary space that people are living in are very similar. It looks like he has used external lighting to help expose his images, which you can tell by the flat light and also shadows that are apparent within his images. I don't like this affect because I feel it makes the images look very clinical and false, but it does help to show the viewer exactly whats in the tent in very high detail. As you can see he has also used a wide angle lens and a large f/stop number to make sure that he captures as much information and detail in the image as possible, which is exactly the same technique I used on my last shoot under the bridge in town. What Roberts does show which I haven't so far is things like the inhabitants supplies and cooking appliances which are obviously essential for survival. As well as photographing the tent in one image to provide the viewer with an inside look into their short-term lives, he has also focused on individual objects within the tent which increases the visual information which the viewer receives about the inhabitants of the tent and what their lives may be like.
Roberts has captured much larger tents than I have so far which makes his images even more impacting to look at. For the development of my idea and technique, I hope to produce these same tent interior shots but in larger homeless tents if I can find them.
Robert's project is a very good example for me to take as inspiration onto the next shoots that I do, and also links very closely with Jacob Riis' How the other half lives, which has provided the foundations of inspiration to this part of my project for this current unit.
