On the Terraces - Evaluation

I have been wanting to photograph a long term project about football fans for a long time as it is a social area of Britain that a lot of people can relate to in a number of ways including myself as I continue to watch & play the beautiful game. Starting in the summer of 2014 I began to document friends & strangers with their football gear on Cheltenham high street, this was short lived and I shelved the idea once Uni had started again but once I was required to produce a long term project for Documentary Perspectives I knew this idea could work. I requested to work with local side Gloucester City AFC for the 2014/15 season as a student photographer, which had given me access to a fan base with an interesting story since they don’t play at ‘home’.

I am already aware of previous projects with this subject matter so I enjoyed researching material from photographers such as Martin Parr & Stuart Roy Clarke. These artists have provided their own spin on the way they have documented the British football fan through the use of flash & medium format photography respectively.  I have also been introduced a new wave of photographers through my research for this assignment, with Todd Hido’s ‘Homes at Night’ series highlighting how I could use long exposures to create interesting images of still life subjects, such as a stadium for example. I was introduced to the ‘Crisis of the real’ text from Andy Grunberg early on for this project which highlights the use of images from the past to present ay, how the ‘Documentary Perspective’ of this images has altered through the course of time & photo management.

When I had starting photographing for Gloucester City, I was shooting for them and did not concentrate on the images that this project could benefit from right away, it took time & feedback for me to realise what images I could capture with the access that I have been given. I slowly realised the perspective in which I was aiming for with this Documentary and by Christmas I think the photographs that I was producing represents this. Through viewing Jamie Luke’s ‘Red Sea’ observational documentary series of Arsenal fans, I knew this was the perspective in which I could display my images, so after looking back at the images that I have shot at the numerous matches that I had covered, some re-editing took place and I began representing that perspective in the book designs through Adobe InDesign.

I have had previous experience with using Adobe InDesign for the Photo Story module last year so I used a lot of the same functions available such as Text & using the rectangle frame tool to place my images on the spreads. I wanted the book to appear in a simple fashion so that the photographs can speak for themselves. However I was also open to experiment with certain techniques to display my images, which is clear in version 4 of ‘On the Terraces’ where I have placed images on alternating pages through it’s entirety. Other software used for this project was Adobe Photoshop, the images used are not heavily re-touches but after shooting in some extremely low light situations at the football matches their curves needed to be altered to add some more light. Using the ISSUU was something new for me, and I enjoy the quality in which it displays a PDF online, It is also handy to see the different editions of the book that have been produced side by side to compare & contrast.

Throughout the course of this module I have received informed and critical feedback from classmates and the course tutor, which has been extremely helpful in my creative decision making for this project. In early editions of this book it was clear that I was aiming to have several chapters that didn’t really relate to each other and the general graphic design aspect of my work was poor, but with their regular & constructive criticism I was able to swiftly improve the quality of what I was producing into a publication that made sense and was heading in the right direction.

I am very happy with the final work that I have produced, it share the documentary perspective I set out to shoot,  an internal observation of football fans however if I was to undertake this project again, there are several areas in which I could improve on. Firstly I would have distinguished the perspective I wanted to cover much earlier on, for the first month or so I was confused as to where the publication was heading. I would also change the way in which I approach the subjects, I was somewhat shooting like an outsider and not part of the group, so I would like to get to know these people on a personal level and achieve greater access to their lives, and this would possibly end up in stronger images being produced.