First impressions

Terence and Marion lives in London and has been married for over 60 years. "You can not suddenly be old and regret not taking that particular moment".

Svitlana and Argentina are daughter and mother, both born in Ukraine. Svitlana lives in Swansea now and her mother is visiting her, they both love it here.

This was my first project; the brief was to complete a set of at least four photographs that reflected, in whatever way, the title "first impressions".
I chose to emphasize on my impression of people in Swansea, people I didn't know, because I find people here so friendly - compared to the reserved Norwegians. So I literally walked around in the city, asking strangers if I could take their portrait. These four persons were really cool and I talked to them each for about 20 min before I took the pictures. This was because I wanted to capture something more than just a stranger; I wanted to listen in on their story a bit before I took the pictures - so that they would feel more relaxed about the camera and automatically look less like strangers.
This leads on to another aspect I wanted to show; how people really become real persons when you just stop and see them - really see them as individuals - rather than ignoring people like strangers. There's no such thing as strangers; it's just people you don't get to know.

Hoppè was a big inspiration for this project; in one of his photoseries ("types") he took portraits of people; persons he saw as representatives for social groups vanishing in society. Yup.