Hasta La Ideas

Thanks to the good people at iStockphoto, Creative Review is awarding £1000 to the graduate of our choice to pursue a personal project of their choosing. We have chosen Hannah Blackmore of LCC to receive the bursary

Hannah Blackmore is one of five outstanding graduates featured in the September issue of CR (out now). She receives £1000 for a personal project which we will feature here on the CR website.

Hannah’s photography and film work documents the overlooked, the unexamined and the forgotten. In Vacant, a series of photographs taken for her degree at the London College of Communication (one shown below), she focuses on the many closed shopfronts in her hometown of Ramsgate.

“When returning from London to Ramsgate, I noticed so many places that were standing still in time,” she says. “Over the past year I have been taking photographs of all the abandoned shops I have seen. These photographs are portraits of nothingness, like time capsules, where everything around them is changing, representing how they are not letting go. While documenting these streets, I collected the memories of these shops from local residents and passers-by. A book was made, looking at the histories that have been forgotten in these vacant and abandoned places, but also at their current situation.”

Blackmore also made a short film about the last remaining shops on King Street in Ramsgate, a beautifully shot document of a world entirely removed from the uniform gloss of the typical English high street. The Keepers of King Street (below) contains a sensitivity and maturity that makes it surprising to discover that Blackmore only began making films after she arrived at LCC. “I always had an aspect of my work that was photography based, but it wasn’t until I started at LCC that I made my first film,” she says. “It was actually in the first week of the course that I made a documentary in the group project. That’s when I knew I wanted to make documentary films.”

Many of Blackmore’s projects so far have sprung from personal experience. As well as the Ramsgate shop series, she photographed her grandfather’s home, and also did a project about her neighbours. “After living in the same house for nearly two years, and having never met my neighbours, I anticipated what they would look like,” she says. “I decided to knock on my neighbours’ doors and ask to take their photographs, revealing the hidden community.”

She then made a newspaper documenting the project. After graduating, Blackmore helped curate an exhibition by graduates on the Interaction and Moving Image strand of the LCC course, held by the college in collaboration with Nexus Productions. Exhibited in a disused office building in Canary Wharf, the show provided an opportunity for the graduates to present their final year degree show in a new location, as well as space to show new works. Among the projects by Blackmore was a new series of portraits of people who work in the local area.

Blackmore is keen to continue exhibiting her photography and creating documentary films. With her combination of a great visual eye with a knack for teasing out a good story, her skills will no doubt prove appealing to those in the advertising and design industries too. More of Blackmore’s work can be viewed at hannah-blackmore.com

You can see the work of the other four graduates selected by CR in our September Graduate Special issue, details below

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR website, but if you are not also getting the printed magazine, we think you’re missing out. This month’s issue has a superb feature on the Sainsbury’s Own Label packaging of the 60s and 70s, a profile of new Japanese creative supergroup Party and our pick of this year’s top graduates. Read all about it here.

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