Personal possessions can reveal aspects of their owner's personality and interests. Photographers have explored this topic by documenting people surrounded by their belongings. Examples shown in the document include portraits that use background details or clothing to provide context about the subject's profession or values. Effective photographs of possessions are able to convey stories and messages through their composition and treatment of light.

1. Personal Possessions
AS PHOTOGRAPHY EXAMINATION
February 2012

2. Personal Possessions
Personal possessions have provided inspiration for many
photographers. Sometimes the photographs of belongings
can reveal the personality and interests of the owner.
Explore appropriate examples and produce your own work.

3. Yann Gross from the Kitintale Project,
2008
Kitintale, located in the Kampala area
of Uganda is the first East African
skatepark constructed by local
youngsters and home to a subculture
that Gross has been documenting for
some years. Gross has been leading
efforts to build a new half-pipe and
community centre.
What does this image suggest about
the relationship between the boy and
his skateboard?
How does the composition of the
picture help to tell a story?

4. “This whole notion of the disappeared, I
think, is something that runs through my
work. I'm very interested in absence and
presence in the way that particularly
black women’s experience and black
women’s contribution to culture is so
often erased and marginalised.”
Who is/was Polyhymnia?
Why has the photographer chosen to
present the subject in this way?
Maud Salter
Polyhymnia (Portrait of Ysaye Barmell),
1989

5. August Sander from the series
People of the Twentieth Century
What do the personal possessions of
this young man tell us about his
profession, character and values?
What are the strange marks on his
face?
“Sander’s portraits, whether half- or
full-length, are always set in a simple
environment. He gave a controlled
and intentional hint at the origin and
profession of the sitter through the
background or through clothes,
hairstyle and gesture.”

6. Roger Mayne
Teddy Boy Group,
Princedale Road,
1956
How do these boys
define themselves as
a subcultural group?
What is the
atmosphere of this
image?
What details stand
out as being
significant?
“I was going out on a foray in North Kensington, and as always I had my camera
around my neck, and I saw this group of teddy boys and even to me as a young
person they were a bit sinister, so I walked down the street on the other side. I got
past them, thank God I got past them, and then I heard this voice, 'take our photo
Mister!'. So, of course, immediately I turned around and photographed the group,
because I mean I wasn't going to miss a chance like that and I realised that they
weren't sinister. They were actually being quite friendly. So I went in quite close
amongst the group and got quite a lot more photographs quite close to them.”

7. Scott Douglas
Louise Bourgeois No. 2, 2008
What does this image say about the
sitter?
How does the composition affect our
view of her?
What do her possessions tell us
about her?

8. William Eggleston T. C. Boring, Greenwood, Mississippi early 1970s

9. Catherine Balet
Ines Connected with Amina from the series
Connected, 2008
How does the camera angle affect our view
of these two young women?
How has the photographer exploited a
variety of light sources to create a specific
mood?
What messages about technological
possessions are being presented here do
you think?

10. “In the 20th century, and especially its last decades, our
relationship to things fundamentally changed. In his essay ‘On the
Poetics of Things in Modernism’, Michael Jakob discusses how
natural products, prized from the Renaissance to the
Enlightenment, have been supplanted by manufactured, mass-
produced goods. Mass production democratizes objects, making
them widely affordable - the trade-off being that they are no longer
special, no longer unique. They have to rely for their appeal on their
glint of newness.”
The Ecstasy of Things, Edited by Thomas Seelig & Urs Stahel

11. Thomas Struth
Laurence and Charles,
New York 2001
How has Struth chosen to
present his sitters in this
image?
How do their
surroundings and
possessions help us
understand who they
are?
In the mid-1980s, after a period of collaboration with the psychoanalyst Ingo Hartmann
studying family snapshots, Struth embarked on a series of portraits of individuals and
family groups, using the same type of large-format view camera that he had used for
his architectural work. These works were again highly constructed, urbane portraits,
showing character but not revealing personality.

12. Many photographers have been
fascinated by the ordinary objects that
surround us. In this series of famous
images, Shore documents the surface
of everyday life in 1970s America in all
its banal detail.
What makes these images successful?
Stephen Shore, from American Surfaces 1972

13. Walker Evans Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Sherrie Levine After Walker Evans No. 7 1981
Hale County, Alabama 1936

14. The series, entitled After Walker Evans, became
a landmark of postmodernism, both praised and
attacked as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal
authority, a critique of the commodification of art,
and an elegy on the death of modernism. Far
from a high-concept cheap shot, Levine's works
from this series tell the story of our perpetually
dashed hopes to create meaning, the inability to
recapture the past, and our own lost illusions.

15. José Antonio Hernández-Diez Hegel, Kant, Kafka 2001

16. Alec Soth Charles, Vasa, Minnesota 2002
What strikes you as interesting and/or
unusual about this image?
Imagine the portrait without the toy
planes. What would be lost?

17. André Kertész Mondrian’s Spectacles and Pipe 1926
What kind of man was Mondrian, the owner of these objects?
How eloquent are objects in representing our identities?

18. James Van Der Zee
An African American couple strike a pose wearing matching
racoon fur coats. West 127th Street, Harlem NYC, 1932.

19. Takashi Homma
from Tokyo And My Daughter
2005-6
Think of a series of adjectives or
phrases to describe the qualities
of this image:
informal
innocent
intimate ... etc.
How good are objects (and
photographs) at evoking
relationships?

20. “Things are an integral part of the psychological makeup of every
individual as possessions or projected desires. They are guarantors
of social status and life-enhancement, proof of affection,
crystallised points of identity, a pledge of transcendence.
Something of the childish pleasure in things, in which the thing
becomes the world and the self, survives in the adult.”
The Ecstasy of Things, Edited by Thomas Seelig & Urs Stahel

21. Some questions to ask yourself:
Which of your personal possessions hold the most meaning?
Where do we tend to keep our special objects?
Which one object would best represent you or someone you know?
Can a single object reveal anything meaningful about its owner?
In what sense can possessions be a kind of trap?
What would it be like to get rid of all the things we own?
How could you photograph the entire contents of your bedroom?
What is it like to give an object as a gift?