Aidan Dunbar

One of the two long term, final projects for the year at University is the ‘Book Publishing’ brief which involves coming up with a concept, shooting a comprehensible series of images and then presenting it - with text if applicable - in a printed and bound book.

Coming up with a concept for a series is something I have never done before, and to be honest I’m having a little struggle. Usually it would be a set of images responding to what is happening around me, or a few one-off images to illustrate a point or achieve an end goal.

Basically, the photography-as-art part flummoxes me.

Thankfully after weeks of procrastination and frankly shocking ideas, I have devised a plan.

They don’t know it yet, but everyone in my (thankfully rather small) halls is going to be photographed in their room to illustrate the personal stamp they have put on the cold, uniformly off-white, prison-cell-esque place that we call home. Actually, it’s not that bad - the kitchen has a vibrant splashes of colour in the form of green cabinet doors, complementing the purple halo around the lights nicely.

The various states of disarray and vast variation in wall adornments say as much about the owner of the room as they do about the room itself. Does it feel light and airy or is the mood a bit more heavy? Over the course of the 40-odd images a diverse cross section of the building’s population will be captured - we are quite an odd collection of people after all.

Sure, the meaning isn’t hard hitting and world changing, but that doesn’t worry me at this point. We don’t have a few years to realise the end product so logistically this project is manageable. I see these people every day, so a little bit of graft on my part and the images can be done in no time.

The government are offering incentives to students who stay at home when they go to University, which makes this project relevant to now. Stay-at-home students don’t have the same experience that people travelling across the country to live on their own, therefore this project meets the “Modern Times” theme required by the brief by illustrating what the stay-at-home students are missing out on, and the lengths the moving-out students will go to make their room feel like home.

And the name? It’s the number of our block, of course.