• Finnamore Wood Prison | Marlow, Buckinghamshire

    I still can’t forget the creepy vibe this abandoned Finnamore Wood prison gave me. Brrr! I had an old post about this but I wanted to re-do the post and refresh the content of it. This is an old photography project I did in 6th form which was on the topic of Mental Illness. And the portrayal of this through movies and modern day media. As I was on the hunt for a location which looked remotely like a mental hospital.

    MY PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT TOPIC:
    MENTAL ILLNESS IN THE MEDIA

    The closest I could find was Finnamore Wood Prison in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. It used to be a Young Offenders correctional facility and then it was a holiday camp during the second world war which housed evacuees from schools and refugees. Find out about the history of the prison here!

    I wanted to showcase most of my pieces – these are my favourites and definitely my better images from this project. I decided to edit all of the images black and white to show the tone in the images and to give off that ‘creepy’ dark vibe of a prison/mental hospital and to show all of the dirt and rust.

    This project was definitely my most favourite out of the 3 I did  in 6th form as I felt like I had more to work with and my inspiration was very strong to help me along with this project, my final piece was a collage of images selected by me which reflected the Mental Illness topic well – including some edited images from this collection and Finnamore Wood Prison.

    MY INSPIRATION FOR THE PROJECT

    My inspiration for this project was 3 horror movies from each century which showed mental illness from the 20th and 21st centuries. From the 20th century I chose Psycho (1960),  One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest (1975), The Shining (1980) and from the 21st century I chose: A Beautiful Mind (2001), The Ward (2010) and Shutter Island (2010). Before starting on this project I created a mood board in my portfolio selecting images from each movie which showed the different mental illnesses and researched how each movie portrayed mental illness also how the audiences reacted to this as well as writing down all the different ideas I had for each movie to create and base my images on.

    LOCATION: Finnamore Wood Prison – Frieth, Marlow, Buckinghamshire

    CHECK OUT MY ONLINE PORTFOLIO: WWW.SHANNONBAKERPHOTOGRAPHY.CO.UK

    Image Copyright: SLBPhotography – 2015