Five Girls

Today I attended a blog writing workshop and we learnt several ways to improve our writing skills. We saw some examples of blog posts and analysed them. One of them was comparing two students' posts, and choosing which one is the better one in terms of how they reflected and analysed their project that they were writing about in their blog posts. Personally, I am not a very strong writer. Not that I'm bad at it, but there are times where I find difficulty articulating my thoughts into black and white. Looking and analysing the way these students wrote their posts gave me a better idea on how I can improve my writing.

An activity that we did that helped create a structure when writing a blog post was to analyse a photograph taken by David Stewart called "Five Girls".

In a group, we drew a huge mind map on what are the characteristics that we saw in the photo.
Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the mind map that we drew but some key characteristics that we pointed out were:

- Different coloured clothing
- They are sitting in close proximity but look distant
- Different personalities
- They are at a social event

We had to write a 300-word blog post based on the mind map that we drew out and this was what Rachel and I wrote together as a paired team:

Five Girls is a photograph by David Stewart who is famous for his portrait photography.


Five Girls (Stewart, 2014)

At first glance, the photograph gave off a very unapproachable vibe. The five girls are all wearing a different colour of clothing. They are sitting close together but looking at different directions and the table has phones, coffee cups and salads.

We thought that different clothing reflects their differences. The photograph also reminded us of the movie "Mean Girls". The film follows Cady, who just moved from South Africa and into a new high school in America. With the same feeling of unfamiliarity from the movie, this photograph gives off that impression too that the girls are not close despite sitting right next to each other.

However, after doing research, we found that this photograph is part of a series. The photographer, David Stewart is the father of the girl in the middle wearing pink and the girls are actually childhood friends in real life. Stewart took a photo of them when they were about to start their GCSEs and are surrounded by fast food and fizzy drinks.


Five Girls (Stewart, 2008)

Self Reflection

We were only given 10 minutes to write the blog post but Rachel and I did not manage to hit the 300-word mark which was a bummer. We got the chance to listen to some of our classmate's posts and one of them that I thought was excellent was June's. The way she articulated her words was fantastic and how she reflected after seeing Stewart's photograph really resonated with me. She talked about how when she is with her friends at a social setting it could get awkward at times because they would go silent momentarily due to the fact that they are always checking their notifications on their phone. Like how the photograph evoked that feeling of unfamiliarity.

I think as weeks go by my writing will improve. As for now, I am still getting used to the momentum of jotting down and articulating my thoughts onto black and white.

Bibliography

Stewart, T. (2008) Five Girls [Photograph]. London.

Stewart, T. (2014) Five Girls [Photograph]. London.