My current idea for Assignment 2 is a set of candid portraits of participants in Musical Memories, a local community initiative to get older people revisiting their younger days through the medium of song. Some, but not all, of the participants have some level of cognitive decline, from age-related memory deterioration to full-blown dementia; others are in good health, as the whole thing is very inclusive. What they have in common is how much they enjoy singing along to the tunes from their past.

My aim here is to capture people enjoying positive memories.

Here are a few mockups in two alternative styles. Note that I have only done one shooting session but have the opportunity to do more, so it may not be these exact images I end up using – think of this as a proof of concept only at this stage.

One of my criteria for these images is that they should visually get across a sense of what it is the subject is remembering i.e. the song.

Version 1

One approach is to keep things quite plain and just have straightforward portraits with the song title as part of the caption:

 

Version 2

I wanted to see if I could get more of the musicality of the memory into the image – sound into vision = tricky! – and after a few frustrating failed experiments (at one point I was mocking up vintage album covers…!) I decided that a relatively subtle approach that doesn’t fight with the main subject too much is to incorporate a sound wave into the borders of the image:

 

A quick note: the sound wave is intended to be the actual song they were singing at the time (I recorded the audio of the whole event), but in these mockups it is the same in each pic, for temporary expediency. If I pursue this version I will incorporate the actual song’s sound wave into each portrait.

Next steps

I will show this to a few study buddies and get some feedback…