Guest lecture Simon Weldon: 1
This week we had a guest lecture by the name of Simon Weldon, who is a photographer and studio technician at the University of Huddersfield. While having a full-time job Simon has just completed his Masters degree in Photography. Today, Simon went through his project that he has been working on over the past few years and continued whilst on his Masters. This project was centred around his father’s battle with alcoholism, Simon went through how his projected started when his dad had moved out of the family home because of drinking, which had gotten worse. Simon would still meet his dad outside of his family home and would take his camera with him, to take images of his father. Unfortunately, in 2013 Simon’s father died after losing his battle with alcoholism, Simon’s way to deal with his father’s death was to use photography to distract himself from the pain of his loss. While he looked over the images he had taken over the years he realised all the images had been related in some way and when it came to starting his Masters he had decided to continue developing this project. The project explored why his father became an alcoholic, Simon found the love of photography stemmed from his father and when he looked through his father’s possessions he found many black and white 35mm films in a folder. These images represented his father’s life when he was younger, this was either in family life or his teenage years, Simon’s idea was create a response to these images, but he found it hard to know where to start with the amount of archived images he had to go through. The first step Simon took was to digitalised the images, this took over a month to do, he then printed them placing them on a table with a white background and video recorded every image.
Siobhan :)
17/02/21
https://www.simonweldon.co.uk/archive
https://www.instagram.com/simonwphoto/
All copyright of images belongs to Simon Weldon, images taken from his website.
