While I was away in Amsterdam, I found myself taking a lot of inspiration from the Jim Jarmusch film 'Permanent Vacation' which is about a kid that just drifts through New York City, he spends a lot of time confused and feeling alone with emotions. I instantly felt like Charles (the boy the film is based around). I felt a connection between me and his situation. I was drifting through a city without my parents for the first time, I entered Amsterdam with no structure towards my next four days there. The reason I have decided to delve into 'Permanent Vacation' is because not only do I feel like I have a connection with the film but this production is still highly linked with my theme, sentimental nostalgia, the whole movie was shot on film in a city of a boy growing up. This boy was going through adolescence which I am trying to capture in my experimentations and hopefully going to capture in my final piece.
I brought a disposable film camera with me and carried it in my pocket the whole time so that I could capture photographs instantly as I had my camera on the move. As we drifted around the city of Amsterdam I started to feel a slight romance with the city, everything started to become beautiful. The perfectness inside nothingness made me appreciate the trip. I decided to take photographs of my friend Stanley a lot of the time with the different backgrounds we visited to show our journey just like Charles in New York, I wanted to capture our journey of adolescence through our first trip without our parents. I decided to take a disposable as it allows me to capture 27 shots, this limited me to how I captured the trip and what photographs I wanted to leave with so I had to make each one count.
Besides Jim Jarmusch not being a photographer and being a director, I really wanted to portray his meanings and emotions into my own work. Jarmusch's work really connected with me and I felt I had a relationship between my work and his while shooting some of my photographs, I am happy with how these photographs turned out as I felt I captured many emotions we feel throughout adolescence. Such as; confusion, dullness, happiness, bleakness, misbehaving etc. As you can see in some of these images my friend Stan either looks really happy and messing about or he is misbehaving on his hired bicycle, stood there staring down the lens of my camera or smoking.
