anna, I'm not sure if this will help you or not, but I wanted to share with you a similar project that I worked on when I was studying as a photo major in college:
Four semesters into my photography courses, I decided to put together a project based on a very serious relationship I was involved in (at another university) that had ended about a year and a half prior to this time. I wanted it to be in the form of a book, with text intersperced throughout. The inspiration was the growth of a two year relationship with someone I was very serious about, serious enough to consider becoming engaged and all that stuff. Basically, it was one of those stories where one person in the relationship drastically changes their personality over a short period of time and the two grow apart.
Anyway, the problem was, during the time of this relationship with this girl, I had no serious interest in photography, as I was a painting major and had no photographic knowledge or skills at that time. The only photos I had that referenced our relationship were simple snapshots that were, in my mind, kinda cheesy and didn' t really convey anything that I was feeling.
So, what I did was go back to the town I was living in when she and I were dating, and with my recently-acquired photo skills, equipped myself with a simple brownie camera (to give the photos a "hazy, memory" feel to them) and took pictures of various places that reminded me of things we had done / seen, things that were said, etc.- some didn't even have any direct relation at all, but rather were photos of places along the journey from where I had lived to the town/school I had relocated to. A big inspiration for me at the time, was Nancy Rexroth's book, "Iowa". I guess that was the overall feeling I was going for, photographically.
I also like to write from time to time, so once I had evaluated and narrowed down the hundreds of pictures I had taken, I organized them to go along with some text that I then scribbled out along the bottom of each photo and spilled out onto the white of the page. The text was a first person point-of-view of how we had grown from being so close to being so estranged from each other. Believe it or not, I managed to pull it off without it being hokey, or sappy. I was actually quite pleased with the final project. I got a really good response from everyone who saw the book... people would say that they could really get a sense of what I was feeling during this period in my life, through the photos and the text, and that encouraged me a lot in my future photographic endeavors.
I guess my advice to you would be this: you have a good idea to work from as a starting point. I would try to be as genuine as possible in your re-telling of this "story", so as to not get into "over-sapping" it with romantic cliches. I fear that this will be hard to do if you are telling the story from another person's point of view. If you do go this route, though, I would pay great attention to the feelings and details of the other's side of their story. Try your best to truly understand what was going on with the relationship, and don't trivialize it- believe me it will come across as half-hearted if you do.
Best of luck to you on your project. Let us all know how it works out in the end!
cheers
|
