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St Austell Then and Now- Guest Student Blog

**Guest Student Blog**

As part of my second-year BA photography course, I chose to come to the royal Cornwall museum as my work placement to work with their image archive. My brief was to look at their vast collection of images and pick out some that I could go shoot today and  compare between then and now. I decided that I was going to look at St Austell based images as my family are from St Austell and I’ve lived there for fifteen years.

Some of the images where instantly easy to recognises as they hadn’t changed much like the image of Fore Street the church and some are the buildings are still the same, however like the image of Poltair where the grass area hadn’t changed yet the treeline had and buildings behind had it was harder to pin point exactly where the image was shot to get an almost exact copy of the framing of the image so I had to ask my Gran for her great knowledge of the area.

From my grans help I decided it would be interesting to see how three generations of my family have seen St Austell change over almost the past 70 years so I recorded the memories and views of my gran Jackie (69) my Mum Julie (50) and myself, Jessi (21). Each account describes the town life of St Austell and how it has changed vastly.

I’ve enjoyed doing this project and would love to be able to continue it and expand to various places around Cornwall.

 

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