Starting with what I know:

Ransom Riggs

The author of one of my favourite books, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, is my first stop for photography inspiration. Although he is known for his writing skills, fictional novels and film content by creating book trailers and YouTube videos, the inspiration for all of this stemmed from photography, more accurately, found and forgotten photos from the past.

Riggs published a book called 'Talking Pictures', documenting all of the photographs that he has collected over the years, from car boot sales, abandoned houses and other places where the photographs might be seen as trash. These photographs are accompanied with written text, giving a quick insight into the moment that the photo was taken and unleashing a small part of the subjects forgotten personality and life.

"Riggs' book is not exclusively devoted to the aesthetics of the snapshot image, but rather touches on the humor, romance, drama, or tragedy of life via the accompanying handwritten text. These photos reveal something profound about our shared humanity in all its varied forms and are a poignant reminder of why we take pictures. None of us who love snapshots will ever look at them the same way again."

These photographs inspire me because of the emotions they evoke within me. They're not all perfectly shot, lit or exposed. Most of them have faded with age and are taken by amateur photographers, such as myself, without intent of the photograph being used for anything other than personal use. Because of this it makes observing the photographs and their handwritten text feel like a very intimate experience, as if intruding on somebody's diary. When I look upon these pictures, witnessing people's life experiences; happiness, sadness, friendship, family and even eventual death, I can't help but feel a mixture of emotions, with an overpowering loneliness. These people and their pictures would have been lost and forgotten forever if it wasn't for Riggs creating this book, and even though their pictures remain, their names, lives and experiences are lost. It reminds me that time can never stand still and that one day my experiences and pictures too will be lost.

Ransom Riggs also does his own photography. He's an avid traveller and takes his camera with him wherever he goes, his images can be found on the Mental Floss website under the category 'Strange Geographies'. Riggs likes to take pictures of sceneries that are quirky or haunting in their own right, forgotten places such as abandoned buildings and towns are often present within his work. Because of this the style of his shots are often dark and grungy, keeping with the mood of the environment that he's photographing. The natural light helps Riggs to produce these moody tones and highly contrasted light and dark shades within his photography.

I like how Riggs stays true to the environments that he's photographing, showing their true beauty and depth. The environments that he travels to can speak for themselves so I believe that editing these photographs too much would ruin the natural essence of the photographs.

Boat - The Salton Sea

As well as environments, abandoned buildings and ghost towns, Riggs also travels to cities and towns where the life styles are drastically different to that of the Western culture. For instance, the below image is from 'Village Life in Vanuatu'. This collection shows how the Vanuatu civilisation live in harmony with nature, sleeping in beautifully decorated straw huts, eating fruit, raising cattle and enjoying the simplicity of life in the village. My favourite image from the collection (below) struck me mainly because of the darkness of the photograph, it seemed very mysterious and made me question why the boy was hiding away from Riggs. The quality is a little blurry on the edges of the photograph which shows that the photograph is not staged and makes the image feel a lot more raw. It's hard to determine the expression on the boy's face which leads the viewer to question whether he is hiding or has been shunned into the darkness. I love the tint of green that pigments to boy's skin from the leaves at the opening of the dark hole, making him seem one with nature. Overall the mystery of this photo intrugues me and leaves me to question many things about this photo: Why is the boy hiding? Is he muddy or is he bruised? And overall, is that a weapon he's holding?