Guest Lecture- Jade Birchnall

Today, On Wednesday 1st February we had a Guest Lecture by Jade Birchnall who is currently a photography student at Manchester Metropolitan University. During her talk she explained her work and some of the projects she has done during her time at University.

Some of her work that she showed us today was very interesting, she showed us a project she recently did which was focusing on the effects of senile dementia, her grandmother suffered from this illness so it was particularly interesting as she could relate to the topic herself, which gave it a more personal feel. In one part of the presentation she used the voice of her grandmother over one of her images that she exhibtited. These images included a note of instructions for her grandmother to read, such as visitors she will be having in the day and this note included what they had to do. As well as photographing this she also contacted the Nursing home named 'The Little Sister Of Poor' which is a Roman Catholic religious institute for women who suffere with Dementia and this particular Nursing Home was run by nuns. During her time in  the Nursing home she did portraits of the people who lived there. During the lecture she said that she felt awkward whilst in the home and she had to build a form of trust with the residents before they would allow her to take the photos.

Her main choice of camera is a medium format but she also took a lot of photos using a film camera but this made the images grainy, which she wasn't keen on, so then tried using a lighting kit to enable the images to become less grainy.

The next set of work that Jade showed us was completely different from the previous work she had done. She visited The Baby Platinum Gentlemans Club to photograph the peole who worked there, who were mainly strippers. She went here with her friend named Amy Clarkson so they could both take different photographs where Amy took full body shots of the strippers and Jade took photographs of different parts of the body. I think that the images that jade took were much less provocative than the full body shots which came across as quite intimidating and were quite elegant.

I enjoyed the talk from Jade, especially as she is of a similar age which I think made it more interesting as nit gave me an insight to what could be in the future for myself. Not only did she talk about her own work but she was able to give information on what University life will be like and how it differs from College, which was really helpful.