Concept

A couple of weeks back we were given the brief as to what we are doing on this project, which was obviously diversity in Plymouth, however I wanted to go that extra bit further and look into Muslim culture. My idea was to do a similar image recreation to Steve McCurry, who took the famous photo 'afghan girl'. In most of his images he concentrates on the eyes, which is what I have tried to recreate. However as I didn't use a model that is from this religion, I didn't want it to come across as being offensive, so I felt I should look more into the religion and find out some more about the culture. I researched the different Muslim headscarves, there are a few different ones and they're called a Niqab, Hijab, Burka, Chador and Dupatta. From my research I also found that many people get a Burka confused with a Niqab, which before I researched I have to admit I was confused about too. The Burka is a veil which covers the entire body and face, with a mesh window across the eyes for the woman to see out of, however a Niqab is a veil covering the head and face but not usually the eyes with a lose black garment that covers from head to feet. In the images I took I used a large piece of material and made my own Niqab for my model. In the photo's I took, I used two types of material that weren't the cultural black veil that Muslim women wear, I decided to use two different materials which was a patterned and a pale blue. However I did decide to also look into 'Niqab' and 'Hijab' fashion, which showed different Niqab's and Hijab's that women wear in multi-coloured patterns. This changed my concept slightly as I thought it would be cool to look into a more fashion approach on cultural diversity. In the photo's below are a couple of images I found on the internet which are similar to the images I have taken and they also concentrate on the eyes which is what I wanted to do for this project as well.