Colin Grey

Colin Grey

In my opinion, I find his work very mined blowing and depressing as you go through his work. The purpose of his work is to show and document his father’s and his mother’s life when very ill and coming to the end of there lives. When it comes to media, technique and materials that he has used to create his pieces of work, it is more or less noticeable straight away what he has used to capture his images as all of his images or well most of them are in a square format, this would suggest he has used a medium format camera to capture the images.

Colin Grey has on numerous occasions spoke out about his work, when viewing his work in the ferens art gallery he stated on a plack “I felt comfortable with the camera square format, perhaps working back to my dads box brownie twin, I now felt that work with my parents was becoming a serious project”.

When viewing his work you get very mixed emotions as from my point of view it was very depressing and mind blowing to look at but to others it was different as some people say it a fabulous collection of images, some say that the set of images is a lot like my comment as it comes across as upsetting and depressing to view in an order.

He hasn’t just created the images that are found in the galleries and art exhibitions, his work can be found over a various number of places ranging from magazines. He also has made different types or genres of photography like Constructive, Narrative and Documentary.

When grey produced his work he had many inspirations but the main ones were the people he photographed in his documentary pieces. The main people being his parents.

The image that I have chosen from his documentary collection to analysis is The Grass is Greener 1989. My thought and opinions on the image when studying it vary due to the way the image has been captured and the way it has been put together.

The subject contained with in the image is an old women leant against a wall with plain white wall paper but with a normal flower pattern contained within it. She is also not, in my opinion, the main subject as in the foreground can be found a rather unique yellow piece of pottery. With the piece been so bright and made to stand out in the image it over powers the lady or women in the background of the image.

The mood for the image is rather plain and moody due to the way the pot in the foreground is made to stand out and the women in the background facing the wall is there to show or suggest how things can be over looked and be placed in the past without and thought of what is going on.

My reaction when viewing the image is a sad and depressing as when you look at the image you get a feel for what it most be like to be alone with no one to look after you.

As a conclusion for looking at his work you get a sense that when his parents were around they were not very well and he wanted to show this through his images. As in most of his collection he didn’t take images of them looking happy like happy snaps, he took images of them when they were struggling or feeling ill.