I returned to manchester with in mind that I had no choice but to ask people if I could take a photo of them doing something which they feel would be an inappropriate act to perform in public. I stood in a spot where hundreds of people passed me from each direction to give me more opportunities and I tryed to look for people who looked nice enough to say yes. The first person who I stopped was a middle aged woman, I said ''Hi, I'm a student from Salford uni, I'm doing a photography project on 'People in places' (that was the only thing I could think of to keep her engaged), Would you mind if I took a photo of you? I also have a slightly strange request, please could you do something which you think is inappropriate to do in public?'' the woman looked at me in a puzzled way and said ''like what?'' I told her I couldn't suggest things because the whole point was to see what other people classed as inapproproate and after she asked me a million times ''What will this photo be used for?'' and I replied ''It's just my uni work, thats all'' she finally looked into the camera and stuck her tongue out.
I was really nervous of the settings of the camera not being right, even though I had taken some quick practice shots of manchester to set them how I wanted, I still had a short burst of fear after every photo I took of a willing stranger as a subject because I knew I only had one shot. After I took this photo I had an upgrade in confidence because she was the first one and she said yes! My luck ran out quicker than it took to take the photo! After this photo I must have stopped around 30 people and every single one of them said no, but did I give up? NO, I asked a few more and slowly people said yes but it still wasn't enough so I thought it was time to change my appraoch to Wurms work. Not only was it the fact that people didn't want their photo taken, another contibuting factor to my giving up on this approach was that everyone who did say yes only felt comfortable enough to pull a face at the camera.
The lady above took her tooth out, which was quite a surprise and told me to hurry and take the photo. I was very grateful to her because she did something she didn't feel comfortable doing just for the benefit of my work. After she did this she said ''wait there''... so I did and then she came back with her friend and asked said ''get your camera ready'', I was a little nervous as to what they would do but was soon put at ease by the signt of this:
I found this trip to Manchester to be very successful, not because it gave me a lot of photos, because it didn't. It was a beneficial trip because it showed me that the direction I was taking was the wrong one. Most people don't like their photo to be taken, especially off a young overly excited stranger in the middle of a busy road in Manchester and even the ones who didn't mind their photo being taken, their reactions to my bizarre request left them with a hard task of thinking of something inappropriate then the even harder task of making a fool of themselves to complete this task resulting in 'not so embarrassing or inappropriate' facial expressions. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get a massive range of photos of different people doing different things because when I set out to do this, I did think I would get a lot of photos of different things, I had images in my mind of young thug like teens swearing into the camera, old ladies pulling faces, young children fake fighting with their siblings and middle aged men throwing little. I didn't need to sit down to plan and think about another way to tackle this 'being inappropriate' in public, some how it came to me right away once I knew i needed another approach. I had the idea of just asking people to write down what they think would be an inappropriate thing to do in public then I re-create this act within a public space; this way I get a range of different inappropriate scenarios and someone willing to perform them.
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