Contextualise

✨WELCOME CONTEXTUALISE✨ With this platform, I aim to reflect on and question how we create and consume the images that surround us. I want to highlight current issues that have been amplified through the soft power of visuals circulating in fashion and other cultural spheres. But more importantly, I want to help creatives, including myself, build a toolkit for creating responsible images that respect the subject, context, and the image recipient. It’s important for everyone to stay critical of their own practice and to constantly keep a broader lens on what they create, whether you're a photographer, stylist, designer, filmmaker, creative director, or other. While I am writing this, I am about to graduate with a degree in Fashion Marketing and Promotion. I am in no way a professional, but simply want to share theories, books, reviews, exhibitions, and projects I find might help anyone adopt a more mindful approach to visual storytelling or to how they view the images they consume. This should be a place to learn, grow and connect, so please feel free to share any constructive thoughts and feedback.

Stop and think twice. Are beauty standards actually realistic and worthy? Do we want our self worth to be dependent on where our hairline naturally ends? Is a sign of age really something to despise?! I think we all know the answer to that!

Juxta Transit - A project rooted in the tension between the designer's Nigerian heritage and Queer identity, discovered and grown in London. Not a story of conflict, but of coexistence of an individual who does not abandon tradition to grow, but grows from within it. Inspired by the photographic legacies of Samuel Fosso and Ruth Ossai, the concept draws on the visual language of the Nigerian amateur family portrait: a humble, tender genre that carries enormous cultural weight. The set is conceived as a living room frozen in memory stripped backdrop, draped curtains, a single wooden chair, and transparent plastic sheeting covering both chair and floor, to prevoke the preserved home, the domestic space held carefully against time. An empty frame hangs on the backdrop: present, but holding nothing. A portrait waiting to be made. In a deliberate nod to Fosso's practice, the camera pulls back far enough to reveal the studio itself, the lights, the edges, the space. What we see is not a memory retrieved but one consciously staged. An act of authorship. A choice about which traditions to carry, and how. CREDITS Designer: @qaaaasimmm @okharraa Talent: @w3b_st4r Photography: @nzar4h Art Direction and Set Design: @manon.hall Assistants: @ilginsdrive @photosby.niki

What does it mean to photograph a community you belong to, rather than one you observe from the outside? We Others: Donna Gottschalk & Hélène Giannecchini at The Photographers' Gallery is an example of understanding what ethical visual representation actually looks like in practice. Gottschalk spent decades photographing her friends, lovers, siblings and fellow activists, queer women, trans people, people living at the margins, not as subjects to be documented, but as people she loved. The result is work completely free of the voyeurism, aestheticisation or exoticisation that so often creeps in when a community is photographed from the outside. For Contextualise, this is exactly the kind of image-making we want to talk about. Images that don't flatten, romanticise or extract. Images made from within, with proximity, trust and time. On until 7 June @thephotographersgallery , London. Go. Images from @donnagottschalk #imagemaking #concepts #photography

Picture This: a conversation about power, perception and the future of visual communication, is available to watch in full (link in bio). LET’S RECAP: Joined by @harriselliottstudio , @chaywardstyle , @kian_bakhtiari_ and Olga Mitterfellner, we explored how images shape identity, culture and consumption, often without us even noticing. We talked about the psychology of advertising and how consumers are engineered into wanting things they don't need; the disconnect between industry leaders and the diversity issues right in front of them; greenwashing and where the responsibility for change really lies; and what it means to create with integrity in a budget-driven industry. Organised and hosted by @manon.hall KEY QUOTES: "Advertising is so ideologically all-inclusive that it's become invisible , if you ask most people, they'll say it doesn't work on me. But that's precisely how it works." -Kian Bakhtiari "If you've got three seconds to get someone's attention, why do what everyone else is doing?" -Catherine Hayward, quoting the late Melanie Ward “Whenever I create things, there's usually a lot of meaning and depth and reference in those things. So for me, creating visuals usually comes from a place of inspiration. And that inspiration can come from a conversation or it could come from a painting, or it could come from something l've seen within a film, but it usually comes from a point of view of trying to represent something. It may not be brand new, but the way the spin that I put on it allows us to look at those images from a new point of view." Harris Elliott on his own creative approach “The starting point really is the Industrial Revolution, when there was a huge overproduction of stuff, and the advertising and PR industries, which used visuals and visual communication to turn people into consumers and make us want things we don't need. So, they started studying the consumer, trying to manipulate the consumer. “ Olga Mitterfellner on the background of Marketing A big thank you to the videographers @robyntroddcam and @lottiesiciliafilm @westminsterfashion @westminsterfashionmarketing

This exhibition, FREE and located at the heart of Shoreditch @autographabp , explores how images shape what we believe and how easily photographic “truth” can be taken apart and reassembled. Through collage techniques, the artists challenge dominant narratives, question archives and expose the politics behind how histories are shown (or erased) through visuals and their publication. COLLAGES: Historically rooted in activism and experimentation (early forms include Papier Collé by Picasso and Braque, and were also used by Dada artists), photomontage becomes a powerful tool for thinking critically about representation. This is especially true in an age of endlessly evolving image technologies. From cut paper to generative AI, over 90 works reveal how fragile images are, and how much responsibility comes with making and consuming them. The artists including Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sunil Gupta, Qualeasha Wood, Jess Atieno, and Sheida Soleimani, use collage to rethink family histories, queer and diasporic identities, colonial archives, bodily autonomy and political exile. This exhibition doesn’t offer easy answers but instead invites us to slow down, question images and become more critical viewers in a visually saturated world. Artist on slide two @qualeasha

Picture This is happening soon! These are just a few of the questions this panel will cover. Come and discover more and contribute with your own ideas of how we can reshape the system💫 Picture This is a conversation about Power, Perception & the Future of Visual Communication. Featuring Harris Elliott, Kian Bakhtiari and Olga Mitterfellner, this panel will unpack some of the ongoing challenges in the field, while asking how the industry might move towards more ethical and inclusive ways of communicating. When: 25th February Time: Doors open at 6 pm, panel starts at 6.30 pm Where: Room MG 14, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road London NW1 5LS RSVP via the following link (or in bio): https://lnkd.in/esuu3j8c

✨I'm organising a panel talk✨ Picture This is a conversation about Power, Perception & the Future of Visual Communication. Featuring Harris Elliott, Kian Bakhtiari and Olga Mitterfellner, this panel will unpack some of the ongoing challenges in the field, while asking how the industry might move towards more ethical and inclusive ways of communicating. Picture This isn’t about preaching or providing definitive answers. Instead, it’s an open space for reflection, discussion, and curiosity, and we invite attendees to contribute to the discussion while thinking more critically about the images they create, consume, and share every day. When: 25th February Time: Doors open at 6 pm, panel starts at 6.30 pm Where: Room MG 14, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road London NW1 5LS RSVP via the following link (or in bio): https://lnkd.in/esuu3j8c