Hannah created a mind map to narrow down her ideas for photographing nature. She decided to focus on plants and flowers, which are easy to find and photograph. The photos will be used in a collage multimedia project, so they need to be clear shots of identifiable subjects. Hannah was inspired by artists who used collage, thread, and pressed flowers in surreal photomontages. For her own project, she plans to create a photomontage showing how nature reclaims what humans have built by using her plant photos, thread, and pressed flowers to depict plants overgrowing abandoned structures.

1. Initial Mind Map and Ideas
Hannah Mizen

2. Mind Map

4. Theme images
These images that I have chosen are to sum up what my theme is, what I see
as nature, so I have chosen lots of of green plants mainly, then adding in
hints other other subject matters such as animals, humans, flowers,
buildings and insects. This mind map has helped me narrow down my
ideas, what I could photograph, as nature is such a broad subject and the
subject could be seen for any different point of view. So from the photos I
have put down you can see I will be mainly concentrating on photographing
plants and flowers. I think this will be an easy subject to photograph
because of the availability of plants. To find plants is easy because they
grow everywhere. I think that my photos will turn out successful for the next
part of my project. The photos are very important to get right for the whole
project to be successful, as I am using them for the multimedia part of my
project, which will be a collage of some sort so the photos of plants need to
be clear and easily distinctive, so you can tell what the photo is of especially
when it has been cut out.

6. Inspirational/Example Images
When researching and finding out about the different photography techniques
and what you could do in production of photos, I found the multimedia
photography was the most appealing to me and sounded like something I
would want to try. When I researched about multimedia photography I
rediscovered collages with artists such as Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann
and Linder Sterling, which used found and their own images to create
surreal final images made from cut outs of different photos. As well as using
photos in collages, artists also use thread and sew into their photographs to
add extra feelings and effect to their final images, people such as George
Hugnet, Peter Blake and Annegret Soltau have used thread in their photos
and have become know for using this technique. Artists have also used
flower pressings and paint in their images to add texture, an artist who has
done this is called Matty Davis. I feel I would like to pursue this kind of style
on my own project, I think I would use photomontage, thread and flower
pressings to create final images. For my final piece there is no exact
examples, but the images on the mood board above are all a mix of an
example of what I want to try and create.

7. Proposal
Since looking and researching all of these artists, themes and ideas, I now
have a clear picture of what I want to create for my project in my head. In
my mind map earlier I had come up with a simple idea of showing the
destruction humans create and what they do to nature, but I want to now
expand past that. Looking at images and remembering own life
experiences, I have seen that on abandoned buildings and man-made
creations, plants have taken back over, whether that is grass swallowing
benches or ivy forcing itself through cement in-between the bricks of
buildings. I want to show how nature is always victorious, how it will always
take back what man has stolen off of it. I’ll do this in a photomontage
creating a final surreal image, using clippings of my own photography,
thread and flower pressings. These tings will be stuck together in way to
make the plants are larger than the buildings, growing out of them,
dominating man-made creations.