To select my final images for this project, I printed out 7 of my favourite images that I felt, encapsulated the brief and my sub theme of absence, worked well aesthetically, compositionally, and conceptually. After laying them out on the floor, I played around with different combinations - first with two groups of three focusing on colour palette cohesivity and content.
With the pictures above, I found that having 3 grouped images of houses with illuminated windows felt too busy and like the images were too similar in content and concept to each other - I like the images but felt they all represented the same idea and didn't need to showcase all 3.
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In the image on the right, I then replaced a house image with a different one (showing birds on a rooftop) as I felt it fit the group, I replaced that specific image of the house as compared to the other 2 it had a slightly warmer colour palette and the other 2 were more visually cohesive. Despite this, I decided not to include the new image of the rooftop in my final images at all as it falls short conceptually. Aesthetically, it's cohesive and feels mysterious and ambiguous, however, my images focus on the lack of human presence in places humans are expected to be, and therefore the rooftop didn't fit this idea.
I then decided to work with one group of 5 photos which I preferred to the first layout. I decided on these 5 as I had removed the rooftop image from consideration and then removed one of the house images as there were already many of them - I decided to remove one with a car in the image as I felt it was distracting and less impactful than the others.
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I then played around with the structuring of these 5 - re-ordering them to find the most visually pleasing layout.
This is the layout I decided on and therefore, the final images I have chosen. I wanted the 3 landscape images in a line and the 2 portraits next to them for balance, and also I wanted to separate the houses as they were the most similar images and didn't want one area to feel too heavy. I chose to put the field image at the top as it has a strong green palette similar to the swings image, therefore separating them again allowed the layout to feel more balanced and less saturated in one area.