What Remains is the body of work produced in 2018 as my final practical project of my University degree. At the beginning of my third year, my Grandad passed away after battling cancer for the prior two years. As someone who had never experienced losing a loved one before, and was already having mental health challenges, I chose to explore my grief through my photographic work. Grief is often a tabooed subject, one that many choose to tiptoe around. At the time I was already researching how human health was portrayed through photography as part of my dissertation.
Through testing different mediums; digital, 35mm, and medium format, I decided that shooting large format would be the only way forward, to capture sharp images that would stand up to be printed to a large scale, in which I was to exhibit in London.
The process of the shoot consisted of taking an initial portrait of the subjects looking off-camera. Then they would read a letter that they had written prior to the shoot to their loved one, in which the audio was recorded. A second portrait was taken immediately after, with the subject now looking directly at the camera.
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